Zephyrus said:
My vote would be against this mostly because CHA issent just bluffing but like sorcerers is a matter of force of will/personality... almost like your Intellegent Item's with their Ego scores.
Not really except in the case of sorcerers, which are an odd man out.
Another reason why I would vote against is that then it would stack too much emphasis onto Intellegence. Intellegence issent as important to an Artificers Infusions as it is to Wizard's Spells. Int is important to an Aritificers Skill points but Its not important to for an Artificer to have high save DC's.
And that's why it wouldn't be unbalanced. IMHO, it makes sense for artificers to have good amounts of skill points and generally be brainy characters, but less so to be social characters; they hardly have the skills to do this anyway. It's one of the major weaknesses that everyone points out about the sorcerer: The class's primary ability is Charisma, but sorcs get no social skills!
Bonus infusions are nice but in all liklyhood Bonus spells for high ability scores favor Wizards who have up to 9th level spells. Artificers might get an extra 1st and possible 2nd level infusion out of a high Intellegence score but that is truely secondary to a high Cha modifier to interface with UMD.
Again, what are you saying here? If you don't use Charisma as the operable stat for UMD for artificers, then Intelligence will become more important to them. More to the point, they won't have to keep Charisma high, and thus will not be multiple-stat-dependent.
As it stands, artificers get less out of a high Charisma than do rogues because a rogue gets to use Charisma to boost not only his UMD score, but also skills like Bluff, Diplomacy, Intimidate, Perform, etc. Moreover, the rogue can afford a lower Intelligence score because he has skill points to spare and none of his class abilities (like the artificer's infusion DCs, for example) are dependent on Intelligence. A player can also easily build a fine rogue and steer clear of Int-based skills. By contrast, an artificer's abilities,
with the solitary exception of UMD, are based around Intelligence (Craft skill, infusions, Disable Device, etc). An artificer also benefits heavily from having more than 4 skill points per level, so Int becomes important for extra points also. Thus, it just seems to me that making artificer UMD dependent on Int would streamline the class's ability dependency and give it a small, but appropriate, boost. Also, it would allow the "reclusive techie" type to be more viable.
