Initial thought: By the time you're through working out all the exceptions and clarifications, this'll end up being pretty involved.
Q1: Scaling class features, such as weapon training. Would they continue to accrue bonuses after they hit the usual maximum? Ex: A fighter gains weapon training at 5th, 9th, 13th, and 17th. I assume in this system they'd get it at 3rd, 5th, 7th, and 9th. Would it continue to progress at 11th, 13th, 15th, and 17th?
Q2: Would these classes gain their capstones at 10th level?
Q3: Prestige classes with partial casting, e.g. esoteric knight (5/10). How would they work? What if they were used to advance a partial spellcaster? How about prestige classes where progressing spellcasting is an optional feature?
Q4: Even 4-level spellcasters e.g. the bloodrager may have class features related to spellcasting which aren't spellcasting. Do they get those twice as fast?
Q5: Some class features advance at distinct levels, some do things like add class level to damage or whatever. Do the latter add twice class level?
Q6: There are a few class features which are based off spells, e.g. a shifter's wildshape. Do those advance at double rate?
I’d be concerned about how this will make content easier. It may not be easier by a huge margin at first, but some will benefit very quickly. Barbarians getting rage powers every level could get pretty crazy.
The middle ground will get complicated. Should inquisitors get this? Kineticists? And what if spells get traded in or out by an archetype, like a sleuth investigator or a warlock vigilante?
One other thing - if you throw up a random idea the chance of it taking you where you want to go is about zero. While it's not entirely clear, the main effect of this is to make non-spellcasters (and possibly partial spellcasters, depending) better in simple combats, while doing little to make them better outside combat or in combats where the situation is loaded against them. If that isn't exactly where you want to go it might be easier to define goals and try and find a path that leads there.
Why twice as fast and not thrice or one-and-a-half?
I understand the point of feasibility but since this is a long and complex discussion, one might as well discuss cursor positioning before implementation details, no?
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Speaking as a caster how would you deal with their annoyance at other classes getting their abilities earlier so by lvl 10 they've got their capstone ability and the caster still has the 10 levels many groups don't like to play into before they gwt theirs? Also a non-caster now has all their abilities by lvl 10 and can multiclass into a full caster or take a prestige class without sacrificing as much.
Personally I think this kind of thing is more trouble than it's worth. If you don't like 9th level casters in your game just ban them. Most 6/9 casters can be built to cover the role of full casters in the party, they'll be less powerful but that's kind-of the idea.
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You jest but speaking as someone who likes playing casters for fun (and usually makes one significantly less powerful than they can be because I'm taking spells like Hygiene or cleanse radiation in a game where it wont apply) I'd be pretty annoyed if told the martials are effectively going to get 2 levels to my 1. Especially since some casters are supporting the group with their spells, partial casters are getting the same benefit and there's nothing to stop someone taking fighter 10, wizard 10 so by the time we're both lvl 20 they have a massive advantage over me ingame*. You could find those who prefer playing casters either not playing your game or not taking a casting class which would significantly impact your game. Remember Clerics are also a full casting class. You could wind up with a party of all martial charactesr no spell casting, no healing.
I get you wanting to bump martials up but I think there are better ways to do it.
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Wizard 20
BAB: +10, +5
Fort: +6
Ref: +6
Will: +12
Max Spell Level: 9
Fighter 10, Wizard 10
BAB: +20, +15, +10, +5 (assuming you don't add the wizard progression).
Fort: +15
Ref: +9
Will: +13
Max Spell Level: 5
Plus the extra fighter feats would easily let them take arcane armour mastery for -20% to spell failure making them a wizard in most light and quite a bit of medium armour not counting things like making it out of mithral to reduce the arcane spell failure by 10% moving them up into nearly all light and medium armour as well as a fair amount of heavy if they're willing to take a 5% failure chance on spells which isn't too bad for someone who's already a full fighter.
Either your setting yourself up for a lot of work balancing this or you've just shifted the imbalance from caster to martial/caster or possibly martial/martial depending on what those more inclined to min-max can come up with.
Wouldn't allow your players to play Gestalt characters but only with martial classes accomplish the same thing with a much simpler execution?
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As someone who likes playing casters, please share with me your thoughts. In your opinion are full caster capstones (or really any other abilities other than casting) about the same power as martial/partial caster capstones? Because truth be told, I said I'd exclude full casters more as a knee-jerk reaction. If I'm not speeding up spellcasting then I guess other full caster abilities might be okay to give them faster.
I think the capstones do tend to favour the casters more than the martials but theres a fair amount of variation in them. That said this is one of the ways i can see to boost martials without annoying someone playing a full caster. Upgrade the martial capstone.
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Wouldn't allow your players to play Gestalt characters but only with martial classes accomplish the same thing with a much simpler execution?
We are already doing that.
Upgrade the martial capstone.You mean instead of this houserule?
Well probably not by itself as that would only affect lvl 20. However there are other options e.g. eliminating feat taxes like combat expertise so they dont need to spend as many feats to get abilities they want, allow people to pick their bonus skill stat (yes this will also help clerics and sorcerers and possibly step on the rogues toes but now the fighter can use str as their + to skill stat instead of int), as others have said just tell people they cant play a full caster (would annoy me less).
To me it looks to increase combat power more than versatility. Sure, you could take advantage of the extra features to say 'That's enough melee damage/tripping ability/whatever, now I'm going to start developing something else' but IME people are more likely to say 'Cool, now I can get 20% better at my specialty!'. And PF already allows non-spellcasters to be good enough at some specialty IMO. It's the narrowness of the specialty that's disappointing, not the ability to lay down the smack.
Now, tweaking. If you decide to go with this more or less as described above, Q/A 5 kind of scrambles the balance of some things. Precise strike and some other things won't scale twice as fast, weapon training and rage (and sneak attack?) and so on will. It's why I asked about that and I'd suggest you reconsider.
Q/A 3 wasn't asking about removing spellcasting, it's asking about whether PrCs would become effectively 5 levels long, and whether that would be conditional on which classes were used to enter them. If you think that no current PrCs are worthwhile - it's very possible to show you that there are builds which do things that are hard to copy without PrCs, and which certainly don't suck.
Your idea creates a lot of odd combinations. How about a more straightforward bonus style system, where characters receive a bonus modifier based on how much of a caster they are?
Let's categorize classes by the level of spells they can cast, so tiers of 0,4,6 and 9. Odd cases will have to manually be put in a tier that best suits them, so I'd put kineticists in tier 6. Things like alchemist's formulae count as spells for this purpose, so alchemist would also be tier 6. Archetypes can change the tier of a class, by gaining or removing spells.
The bonus should address some of the problems of martials vs casters, so I'm thinking it gives an untyped bonus to all skills and ability checks. This will improve how useful a non-caster is out of combat. Depending on how strong you want to make this adjustment, you could also have it affect other things like attack bonus, damage, AC or saves.
Now we just have to figure out how fast the tiers receive their bonus. To start I would go with what I have below, but any new system like this would want a LOT of tweaking.
Tier 0: +1 per 2 levels of this tier(or 0.5/level if fractional)
Tier 4: +1 per 4 levels of this tier(or 0.25/level if fractional)
Tier 6: +1 per 8 levels of this tier(or 0.125/level if fractional)
Tier 9: no bonus
Please note that martials already tend to do large amounts of damage, so don't need much of an improvement there unless you are trying to overcompensate for what they lack in out of combat utility. Also casters are a little weaker than martials at very low level, so you don't want to offer much to martials early on.
Could the OP maybe explain why they find martial characters so underwhelming, not compared to primary casters, but on their own?
A1: They won't get more than they would get at 20th level. After taking 10 levels in a class you are expected to multiclass into another class.
A2: Yes. At least IMO martial capstones aren't great and I don't see them being unbalanced if gained at 10th level.
It'd certainly add a carrot to rogues if they got a save-or-die on every creature they manage to sneak attack. (In fact, that could make certain APs/modules with multiple rogue ambush encounters challenging in a Rocks Fall Everybody Dies sort of way.)
That said, I'd give it a go.