The universal ability score is something that has been bouncing around my head lately. I doubt that it is possible to get all skills to use one ability, but it is an interesting idea none the less. So could anyone help in making a build that uses as little variation in ability scores, for skills, as possible? (Or any aspect of a character, but mostly skills)
Examples being "Brusing Intellect"
There's a huge X to Y conversion guide I'm sure someone can link in here for you.
There's the Conversion Inquisition for Inquisitors that puts some Charisma skills to Wisdom.
Wisdom of the Flesh trait for a Str or Dex skill to Wisdom.
But this is all covered in that X to Y conversion guide.
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All? No. Many? Yes.
I have started a thread a few weeks ago about a Int-focused character. I continued to work on that and, although the build is far from finished, the skills aspect seems to be quite straightforward. The most minimal build I can think of is Half-elf 3 Empiricist Investigator with Balanced Education, Clever Wordplay[Handle Animal/Disguise or Perform] and Precise Treatment traits, Skill Focus[Linguistics] and Orator feats, and Perceptive Tracking Investigator Talent.
Empiricist enables to use Int on Perception, UMD, Diplomacy to gather info, Disable Device and Sense Motive.
Orator makes you use Linguistic (which is Int based) in place of Diplomacy, Bluff and Intimidate to influence people (so feinting and demoralizing are still Cha-based). Bruising Intellect lets you use Int for all Intimidate checks (including to demoralize), but it's incompatible with Clever Wordplay. The most effective way to get Int to both demoralize and feint is to get the Cunning Liar trait together with the Taunt feat (you need to be small sized). At this point you might not even need Orator, as all social skills are covered except for Diplomacy to befriend people, which is unarguably the most important social skill, so I guess picking Orator still makes sense. As a nice plus, with Orator you can add Inspiration for free to social skills made to influence people, with +3 from Skill Focus. Unfortunately Cunning Liar is incompatible with Balanced Education (more later).
Clever Wordplay lets you use Int on one Cha-based skill, and at this point there are only three left: Disguise, Handle Animal and Perform. A Hat of Disguise (or a Disguise Self extract) adds +10 to the Disguise check, so I might say that it isn't a priority. The greater version makes you actually polymorph into a humanoid at will. I would pick Handle Animal.
Precise Treatment lets you use Int on Heal checks.
Balanced Education lets you use Int in place of Str once per day, so it would be Climb or Swim. If you have a decent Dex bonus, consider the Graceful Athlete feat, otherwise just drink an extract of Monkey Fish.
An astrolabe lets you use Int on Survival checks to avoid becoming lost, while Perceptive Tracking lets you use Perception to follow tracks, which more or less exhaust all the relevant uses of Survival.
Overall, this lets you use Int on 24 out of 35 skills, plus Climb or Swim if needed, once per day. Since you can choose at the moment, and since they are quite rare, together with the fact that you can just avoid the checks altogether with Monkey Fish, we can confidently say that both skills are covered. 6 out of the 9 remaining skills are Dex based so, while not all of them are Int-based, if you have a decent Dex bonus (16 maybe), we can say that 32 out of the 35 skills use only 2 ability scores. The remaining three are Disguise (which can be easily handled with magic/items), Performance and Profession.
On top of this one more Investigator level gives you Studied Combat and 2nd level extract. You can then add Mindchemist levels and/or Elven Combat Focus to add Int to damage. Another nice race is Wayang instead of Half-elf for the nice Dex/Int racial bonuses and being small, which adds +4 to Stealth (on top of the racial +2 to Stealth and Perception) and allows you to get Taunt, negating the -4 to demoralize.
All? No. Many? Yes.
I have started a thread a few weeks ago about a Int-focused character. I continued to work on that and, although the build is far from finished, the skills aspect seems to be quite straightforward. The most minimal build I can think of is Half-elf 3 Empiricist Investigator with Balanced Education, Clever Wordplay[Handle Animal/Disguise or Perform] and Precise Treatment traits, Skill Focus[Linguistics] and Orator feats, and Perceptive Tracking Investigator Talent.
Empiricist enables to use Int on Perception, UMD, Diplomacy to gather info, Disable Device and Sense Motive.
Orator makes you use Linguistic (which is Int based) in place of Diplomacy, Bluff and Intimidate to influence people (so feinting and demoralizing are still Cha-based). Bruising Intellect lets you use Int for all Intimidate checks (including to demoralize), but it's incompatible with Clever Wordplay. The most effective way to get Int to both demoralize and feint is to get the Cunning Liar trait together with the Taunt feat (you need to be small sized). At this point you might not even need Orator, as all social skills are covered except for Diplomacy to befriend people, which is unarguably the most important social skill, so I guess picking Orator still makes sense. As a nice plus, with Orator you can add Inspiration for free to social skills made to influence people, with +3 from Skill Focus. Unfortunately Cunning Liar is incompatible with Balanced Education (more later).
Clever Wordplay lets you use Int on one Cha-based skill, and at this point there are only three left: Disguise, Handle Animal and Perform. A Hat of Disguise (or a Disguise Self extract) adds +10 to the Disguise check, so I might say that it isn't a priority. The greater version makes you actually polymorph into a humanoid at will. I would pick Handle Animal.
Precise Treatment lets you use Int on Heal checks.
Balanced Education lets you use Int in place of Str once per day, so it would be Climb or Swim. If you have a decent Dex bonus, consider the...
This is precisely the kind if stuff I was looking for, thank you so much. This'll help me immensely
There's a huge X to Y conversion guide I'm sure someone can link in here for you.
There's the Conversion Inquisition for Inquisitors that puts some Charisma skills to Wisdom.
Wisdom of the Flesh trait for a Str or Dex skill to Wisdom.
But this is all covered in that X to Y conversion guide.
That was a great guide but, maybe due to me skimming a good amount of it, felt more like a starting place than a complete guide. Might be wrong though, I did only skim it, thanks none the less
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I Developed a build that does what you're looking for (sort of).
Race: Tiefling
Class: Investigator(2), Bard(10), Enchanting Courtesan(2)
Traits: Balanced Education (Regional), Clever Wordplay (Social), Precise Treatment(Magic), Beast Bully(Racial),
Archetype(s): Empiricist
Feats: Skill Focus[Linguist], Orator, Empty Threats, Spell Focus (enchantment), Acrobatic, Slayer's Feint or Agile Feint
Ok, now onto the skills
Appraise
Craft (All)
Knowledge (All)
Linguistics
Spellcraft
All of these skills are already intelligence based and so nothing further needs to be done to address these.
Acrobatics
Disguise
Escape Artist
Fly
All of these can be taken care of by taking the trait Clever Wordplay and having it apply to Performance (Dance). This makes the performance skill intelligence based. Taking levels in bard then allows you to use versatile performance and Expanded Versatility to use Performance (Dance) on all of those skills.
Disable Device
Perception
Sense Motive
Use Magic Device
These skills are all taken care of via Empiricist Archetype Directly.
Heal
The Precise Treatment trait directly turns this into an intelligence based skill.
Climb
Swim
The trait Balanced Education allows you to make these intelligence checks, the only downside is that you can only do this once per day.
Bluff
Diplomacy
Intimidate
These skills are all addressed partially with the Orator Feat, by turning certain aspects of the skills into linguistics checks which is already an intelligence based skill.
Bluff gets completed by taking either Slayer's Feint or Agile Feint since it turns the missing aspect into an acrobatics check, which is already an intelligence based skill for us.
Diplomacy is completely turned into an intelligence check between Empiricist and Orator
Intimidate is completely turned into an intelligence check between Orator and Empty threats. Empty threats turns that aspect of the skill check into a bluff check, which we have already turned into an intelligence based skill.
Handle Animal
The trait Beast Bully turns this into an intimidate check, which we have already turned into an intelligence based skill check. You may need to use a spell like speak with animals however, as it could be ruled that this won't work unless the animal can understand you.
Sleight of Hand
The Enchanting Courtesan's ability Seductive Intuition allows you to use Sense Motive in place of Sleight of Hand and Diplomacy checks. Sense Motive is already an intelligence based skill for us at this point. You may need to use something like a hat of disguise though in order to make sure that you can always use this ability against targets. Additionally, it's arguable, that this may not allow you to hide items using sleight of hand, then again if the person doing the searching is attracted to you it might make some sense.
This leaves me with the following skills unchanged
Profession
Stealth
Survival
Now, comes the interesting part. The Shaman spirit of lore, turns all intelligence based skills into wisdom based skills. Both Profession and Survival are already wisdom based so this just leaves us with Stealth.
Since, we are now suddenly going wis instead of Int the trait Precise Treatement isn't doing anything for us. So we can swap it out for the trait Wisdom in the Flesh, which allows us to make any one str, dex or con based skill into a wisdom based skill, turning stealth into a wisdom based skill for us.
so, I couldn't quite make everything Int based, but I was able to make everything wis based.
Did I miss anything?
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I'm assuming you meant to put bard (enchanting courtesan), Shaman 2 in the class and levels listing. This is a pretty awesome build that I might just steal. What would be the ideal order to take levels in to make the most use of skills as early as possible?
I feel like, since it's going wisdom, you'd want to start with Shaman to get the wisdom-to-skills first.
heh, thanks!
Enchanting Courtesan is a PRC not a bard archetype, it's from "Pathfinder Campaign Setting: Inner Sea Intrigue". Incidentally, some of it's requirements lined up nicely with things that were already happening in the build, like requiring perform dance and being able to cast enchantment and divination spells.
You could start with Shaman, and that would make a certain amount of sense. A whole slew of skill adjustments come from the investigator levels. So, maybe something like
Shaman (2) -> Investigator (2) -> Bard(4) -> Enchanting Courtesan (2) -> Bard(+6)
With this progression, by the time you hit 6th level the only skills that won't be wisdom based are
sleight of hand
escape artist
disguise
bluff (feinting in combat)
and then your choice of
Climb & Swim
Heal
Handle animal
the reason being, in order to have 4 traits you'll need to take the feat additional traits which gives you 2 more. Unfortunately, your feats will be tied up until after 7th level. At which point you'll need to take
Additional Traits
Acrobatic
Slayer's Feint or Agile Feint
and the only thing the last 2 feats are doing for you is cover feinting in combat w/o using bluff.
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Very nice build!
I know that this is what the OP asked, so this is not a critique at all, it's just that on a realistic character you'd still need a decent Cha to cast Bard's spells, and a not too low Int to actually have skill ranks (assuming you don't care about Investigator's extracts), which makes the whole porting on Wis a bit meaningless. On the other hand, while the Investigator build I suggested before doesn't cover all the skills, it comes online very soon and synergizes well with its class features.
Very nice build!
I know that this is what the OP asked, so this is not a critique at all, it's just that on a realistic character you'd still need a decent Cha to cast Bard's spells, and a not too low Int to actually have skill ranks (assuming you don't care about Investigator's extracts), which makes the whole porting on Wis a bit meaningless. On the other hand, while the Investigator build I suggested before doesn't cover all the skills, it comes online very soon and synergizes well with its class features.
heh, thanks
yeah, my goal was just "all skills to one stat" and I didn't worry about how playable the character would be.
I'm sure it has bloat.
for awhile it had an amusing situation where I was taking a trait called "The flexing arm" to turn escape artist into a Str based check. Then you could use balanced education to turn it into an Int check. It gave me a mental image of a character REALLY flexing their..... brain to break out of chains. But I dropped it when I found something else that was more consistent.
IMO, it's better keeping it as an Intelligence build and just not worrying about, the last few skills and feinting in combat. But the sudden flip to wisdom at the end was too beautiful to pass up. :)