Krafen said:
I believe the exact ruling was you must wear the headband for one entire level before you can begin gaining bonus skill points. Additionally, if you ever take off the headband you permanently lose all bonus skill points gained by wearing it. This begs the question, how do you wash your hair?
I find this approach to be awkward and unreasonable.
You must wear the item for the greater part of the level.
When you have higher Int due to the item, the bonus to skill points you receive simulates your better understanding or insight of the situations you encountered; you cannot lose those skill points any more, even if you take off the item afterwards, since
in that part of your adventuring life you were more intelligent, and that allowed you to gain more experience (not X points) from the situations you went through.
That is consistent with the rule about non-retroactive skill points. Just because you are more intelligent
now , doesn't mean you gain more benefits from your
past experience. I actually could disagree, but I could also disagree about becaming more intelligent from one day to another, so let's just talk about the rules
Besides, there's probably a game mechanic problem in retroactively assign skill points. Hp and Con is easy math, but what about granting extra skill points every time someone has an Int boost? Your character should redo the math from the beginning, calculating the class and cross class skills for every level of every class he has. This can be quite a work to do, and an unnecessary one too, considering that he'd lose those skill points soon. So, that rule simplifies things a lot IMO, although I agree that retroactively assign skill points for Inherent and Level Up bonuses doesn't unbalance the game at all...
Edit: grammar