looking for feedback advice on an ideas for caster balance PF

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So in short I don't like how casters tend to have their cake eat it too and then move onto the entire bakery all as a standard action as well so I'm interested in looking for ways to hinder them but I don't really want to make them unplayable or not fun (unless being the bane of bakeries is you're idea of fun in which case I suppose I am)

so at the moment I'm toying with the idea of
1:
splitting up spellcraft and making it a school by school skill series ie you take spell craft (evocation) spell craft (illusion) this should soak up a wizards skill points quite effectively stopping them from taking the skill monkeys cake

2:
also making a requirement of having a spellcraft school check of 2x spell level to be able to know or cast a spell

3:
would probably have to give sorcerers an extra class feature to give a bonus to all spell craft checks since they don't get the extra skill points from focusing int so maybe a bonus of half sorc level to all spell craft checks


I'm thinking adding a free action knowledge arcana check to identify a school before making the spell craft check to identify the specific spell with specialised school always succeeding and banned schools always failing or just having bonuses and negatives instead

anyway looking for feedback in this as a concept since I've not had any proper experience as a caster player any advice would be appreciated.

[Mulletmanalive]

It's really not the wizard's skills that allow them to screw with the skill monkeys; it's some of the spells.

Specifically Knock, Detect Traps, Charm Person [screws Diplomacy] etc etc etc.

Your options boil down to:

a) rewriting or elliminating those spells so that the wizard can't just roll over the rogue [tricky with the 3e take on wands]

b) remove wands from the equation entirely. Harsh, but I've seen it in action and it works ok. This has the flipside of requiring you to massively up the power of the Cure spells because of the lack of Wand of Cure Light Wounds

c) The "Spellcasting is tiring" option from the Dragonlance books. Basically, every time you cast a spell, you've got to make a Fort save against 10 + Spell level, where magic won't help on the save. Failure renders you Fatigued [which in this variant drops you CL by 2. Failure while fatigued leaves you exhausted, which inflicts a -6 on your CL. Failure again leaves you Unconscious.

If the setting is built around it and the players are well aware what they're getting themselves in for, this is pretty effective in limiting "overshadowing" as it limits the players to not wanting to risk spells on mundane stuff. Throw in a feat that allows you to recover from fatigue faster to help a bit.

[Yora]

All problems with powerful spellcasters are almost never because of the class, but because of the spells. When you really want to make a difference, you have to approach it by changing the spells, not the classes.

[Yitzi]

As Mulletmanalive said, casters don't overshadow skillmonkeys by spending skill points, so your idea would do nothing to help with that point.

[Glimbur]

c) The "Spellcasting is tiring" option from the Dragonlance books. Basically, every time you cast a spell, you've got to make a Fort save against 10 + Spell level, where magic won't help on the save. Failure renders you Fatigued [which in this variant drops you CL by 2. Failure while fatigued leaves you exhausted, which inflicts a -6 on your CL. Failure again leaves you Unconscious.

If the setting is built around it and the players are well aware what they're getting themselves in for, this is pretty effective in limiting "overshadowing" as it limits the players to not wanting to risk spells on mundane stuff. Throw in a feat that allows you to recover from fatigue faster to help a bit.

There has to also be a clause where you can't recover from this fatigue via spells, because otherwise lesser restoration (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/restorationLesser.htm) makes this somewhat trivial.

Even then, it still doesn't fix the "I can do that" features. Wizards can still cast divination spells ahead of time, as the CL there is not critical, and exhaustion goes to fatigue after an hour. Persisting Clerics can still do their thing as they are casting well ahead of actual encounters; also Clerics get a good fort save. Druids still get wildshape and animal companion quite safely as well as a good fort save. It makes it harder to play a slightly optimized wizard (point buy Int as highest stat) while not significantly restricting TO wizards. Granted, TO shouldn't happen in real games anyway, but...

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I know that the big problem is specific spells and you always need to go over and try to tweak the broken ones but I was looking for other options as well the fatigue for casting spells sounds like a good option but what I was looking or with this was stretching spell casters a little if you can only learn a spell (outside of the 2 at level up) by making a spellcraft of the specific school of the spell that limits them a little in pathfinder there's eight different schools so barring or giving negatives to banned schools wouldn't prevent casting but would limit access to spells from that school to a lower level of casting (I think in pathfinder you can cast spells of banned schools but it takes double slots)
the idea being that suddenly you have 9 skills (7 if you ignore banned ones 6/8 + knowledge arcana) that soaks points if you want to be able to make skill checks without relying on spells you have to weaken your ability in a certain school

so is anything from this salvageable or is it not worth the effort to pursue?

[Yitzi]

I know that the big problem is specific spells and you always need to go over and try to tweak the broken ones but I was looking for other options as well

The problem with that is that if you just nerf the whole class enough to cancel out the broken ones, then those spells that aren't broken become underpowered. You can sometimes nerf a whole category of spell (e.g. save-or-die) if the whole category is broken, and sometimes it's better to provide an effective counter than to tweak the broken spell, but it does essentially have to be done on a spell-by-spell basis at least some of the time, and on a category-by-category basis the rest.