What should Pathfinder 2 have been?

[Gnaeus]

When I get a new edition of a game I expect it to be similar to previous editions, maybe slightly streamlined. I expect it to be written for fans of the old game, at least in significant part. So when I get the next edition of GURPS I will expect a point buy system with lots of fiddly advantages and disadvantages. If I buy the next Vampire I would expect a templated system that lets me buy powers, skills and stats with exp based on my template. I was presumably a fan of the old system or I wouldn’t be buying the new one.

This goes triple for pathfinder. Since the only reason most of us bought their stuff to begin with was a fondness for the d20 system. I’m relatively fond of their changes, but really all I cared about ever was more 3.5 style content. At their height the PF design team was maybe very slightly more game savvy than the 3.5 design team (after a decade of experience). They fixed some things ok, and their new classes and archetypes were more often balanced with each other around the T3 level. But they were still making T1s and T5s and pretending they were balanced.

The very last thing I want a new game edition to do is follow the market leader. I could have just bought the market leader. I probably own the market leader. As it happens, I think 5e meets their design goals of tightened power curve with some character flexibility quite a bit better than PF2. (Because actual multiclassing provides more real flexibility than picking 30 feats most of which do nothing) But even if I thought it was as good I don’t need something similar to the industry gorilla. 5e would win solely by virtue of better marketing and support.

PF2 failed on every front. It did not produce a product recognizable as a successor to the first edition. It did nothing for the fans who only ever supported PF because they liked the 3.5 design philosophy. And it made a strictly worse version of a game everyone had.

{Scrubbed}

What should they have done? A ranking of classes by power level would have been nice. Partner with the best of the 3p designers to allow official support for spheres or DSP. Expand and refine useful subsystems like downtime rules and kingdom building. Fix the race builder. Give more support to Starfinder, maybe introduce more genre style spin-offs. Provide unchained versions of the late developed classes that were mostly low quality. Fix problem powers like planar binding similarly to how they fixed polymorph. PF1 has a number of systems I enjoy. Most of which could be improved with more options and development. (Actually I think the starfinder ship system should have borrowed a lot more from the downtime system, with different resources you can spend to build stuff).