While musing over the issues of inter-class balance, skills, and classes that suffer from MAD a thought occurred to me.
What if characters received bonus skill points from every ability modifier and were forced to spend these skill points on skills related to that ability score? Their class (and human) skills could be spent anywhere they like, but a character with a +2 strength bonus would be required to spend his two bonus points from strength in strength based skills.
I realize there are no Constitution based skills in PF, and there are certainly less options to choose from when spending physical ability score skill points, but it occurs to me that this would help the MAD classes while being mostly irrelevant to the most notorious casters (wizards).
Giving sorcerers, oracles and clerics more skill points to use won't make them noticably more broken IMO, since spells do that in the first place, and for every other class it would be an increase in skill points available for the "bread-and-butter" skills they need to function, allowing them greater diversity and options.
What do you all think? Would this help improve the experience of playing a martial character while not ramping up the power on the casters too much?
Eh, I'm not really into the idea. Int has very little use beyond classes that use if for spells, and skills. If I had my way, I'd want to find ways to make sure it had more uses beyond those classes, than less.
This doesn't remove the value of Int at all...it adds something for those classes that don't have a reason to prioritize Int and aren't spellcasters (and therefore needing buffs).
It seems that there would be an excess of skill points, and then there is the con problem. What about assigning classes bonus skill points by ability? Like, a fighter gains his 2 class skills, a skill that can be spent for STR and one for DEX?
