Shafted out of a skill point?

[buzz]

Okay, there's a link on today's news page to some comments on SKR's site about D&D. One of the things mentioned is:

Human bonus skill points should be applied after any Intelligence penalties to skills. It?s more advantageous to the character to do the +1 human point after the Intelligence penalty, because a human character with a big Intelligence penalty would reduce you to 1 skill point (the minimum), and then your human bonus would bring that up to 2.

If you applied the bonus point first, that would penalize the low-Int guys even more than they already are. Applying it first, in effect, negates the advantage that humans get for their bonus skill points. It?s a corner case, but an important point.

In d20M, the extra skill point for being human is added into the class skill points by default. However, the minimum skill points per level is still 1, not 2.

Now, granted, this is just SKR's commentary, not canon, but it makes me wonder if this was an oversight, or if d20M is somehow "balanced" so that the minimum of 1 is no big deal (assuming it even matters much).

Just a thought.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Well, the problem will never appear if you use a point buy system - everybody has at least an Int of 8, so it is impossible to have fewer than 2 skill points per level (minium per level before INT adjustment is 3!)

Mustrum Ridcully