INT bonus to skill points retroactive?

[Norfleet]

Skillpoint retroactivity is only the beginning of clean, reconstructible bookkeeping: Frankly, the 3/3.5E skillpoint system is a horrendous mess when it comes to backtracking: If the visible manifestation of a character's skills is the +X to them, then you have a huge mess, under core rules: First, if a character's int varies with level, such as if he is a wizard or otherwise raises int, you have to track when, exactly, he raised int to even reconstruct the number of skillpoints he should have. This becomes a severe issue with, say, Wiz/Clr/MTs, for whom raising which stat may not be entirely clearcut: He can raise Int or Wis, and may choose to raise both....which means that WHEN he raised Int as opposed to Wis becomes important for tracking how many skillpoints he should have.

Then there's that whole cross-class skill business, which becomes an absolutely horrendous nightmare when multiclassing becomes involved: Then you have to wonder when he purchased a point as a class skill, when he purchased it as a cross-class skill, and the fact that his maximum is different if it's a class skill for one class, even if he has to purchase ranks cross-class using the points of another class, blah, blah. Just try this with a fighter/rogue who is primarily a rogue: Say with an end goal of a classical R16/F4 build. Fighters, of course, have a horrendously crippled pool of class skills to pick from....only a few of which overlap with the rogue. For a pure fighter, it's not a major issue because he faces the same choices every level, with the same skillpoints: He can just keep raising the same skills every time. For the multiclass character, however, it becomes an interesting dance not unlike corporate tax accounting: How to get the skills you want maxed, while making sure you don't pay cross-class penalties. You get this interesting behavior where, when the character levels as a rogue, he'll WON'T raise the overlapping skills at all, so that he can use a fighter level to shovel points into it while it's a class skill: Since there's no rule dictating how many points can be shoved into a skill at once, only the maximum, it's perfectly legal for him to level as a fighter, and shovel all of his skillpoints into one or two skills: If he has a high int, and perhaps is human, he's likely to have more skillpoints available to him than his skillpoint-impaired class will have decent skills.

All of this, of course, would be significantly reduced by a simple "once a class skill, always a class skill" system, instead of that "maximum-rank as a class skill, but purchased either class or cross class.....blah-blah-my-head-hurts" stuff. Designing a multiclass character, particularly a multi-rogue, becomes an exercise in corporate tax accounting, with all the attendant joy.

Frankly, the entire skills and skillpoint system is a horrendous bookkeeping nightmare: Multiclass characters greatly exacerbate the problem.

 

[Keith]

I find that keeping a character sheet for each level as a character progresses is handy. When you create a character at a higher level, on the other hand, it seems like a ton of work to do that. It is hard to avoid the cross-class skills and skill points problems described above if you don’t do something, though. I have seen some higher level characters created where the total number of skill points was computed with the final INT score, and they were distributed to any skills that were class skills at any point in time.
If all your characters are like this, it is at least fair to the players, but it is still moving those characters pretty far outside the “balance” parameters of the game as it is written. If such characters are mixed with ones following the rules, they are getting way too much of an edge, and it is unfair.

Characters should be built a level at a time, even if you are crating a tenth level character (or whatever level). That way, these two problems can be avoided. It is not much more work, and most likely results in characters much more like ones that actually progressed, as opposed to the approach of creating the finished character in one fell swoop.

I don’t think that creating accurate characters and keeping track of them is all that grueling. It is a pretty streamlined system that creates pretty interesting characters who are fairly well balanced relative to each other, in my view. Sometimes the work involved is a little tiring, definitely.