[3.5/PF] House Rule Suggestion: Everyone is open-minded?

[Maginomicon]

What if everyone was open-minded?

In D&D 3.5...

Variant A: Imagine that every level that you got a feat from hit dice, you also got Open Minded (+5 skill points, can be taken multiple times) as a bonus feat.

Variant B: Imagine that instead every level that you didn't get a feat from hit dice, you got Open Minded as a bonus feat.

Question 1: For each variant, would the game significantly change? If so, how?

I have a feeling that if everyone could have more skill ranks distributed around, while the skill-monkey-archetypes would be somewhat diminished in their niche, they wouldn't be under as much pressure to cover as many bases as they otherwise would have to. And besides, they'd get the Open Minded feat too, so that's another 5 skill points to play with.

With variant A, obviously you'd get fewer skill points total than variant B, but I'm looking for a more broad-spectrum answer, such as how player choices would work and how optimization methods would change.

Question 2: If feats from hit dice in 3.5 used the PF progression (one every other level) but otherwise was the same, how would each of these variants impact the game?

I have a feeling that with this scenario, since you'd be getting the same number of extra skill points regardless of variant A or B, the impact would be the same between them.

In PF...

Imagine that everyone got Open Minded (http://www.d20pfsrd.com/psionics-unleashed/feats/open-minded) (+1 skill point per HD, can only be taken once) as a bonus feat at first level.

Question 3: Would the game change significantly? If so, how?

[deuxhero]

Feats from HD are normal feats. Bonus feats are named because they are in addition to those

Otherwise changes very little. Help the non-int based 2 skill point class (which really shouldn't exist), but not a game changer.

[whitemoth]

It depends on how important skills are to the campaign overall. It wouldn't take long to get everyone in the party maxed out on class skills, and potentially on cross-class skills, so if skills are important to the campaign it would effectively make them less important by making them easier. Whether that's good, bad, or indifferent is subject to interpretation by the DM and the players.

[Mnemnosyne]

I doubt an extra 35 skill points, which, divided up between 20 levels amounts to 1.75 skill points a level (going by +5 skill points at levels 1, 3, 6, 9, 12, 15, and 18) is going to let everyone max out that many skills. That's slightly less than a 4 point boost to Int, and there aren't many classes where you can max out all skills if you only had 4 more Int.

The option where they get the bonus feat every level they don't get a normal feat would give 30 more skill points for a total of 65, and give effectively 3.25 per level. That's just over a 6 point boost to Int, comparatively speaking, and might bring them closer to maxing out all class skills, but probably not with many classes, still.

In any case, I kind of like the idea. Skill points have always felt annoyingly restricted to me in 3.0/3.5, perhaps because skills seem to cover too many widely differing things, including things I've always thought should be independent of skills. This is especially true with Craft and Profession skills. While this doesn't fix those issues, and not everyone will agree about those being serious issues, it alleviates them to some degree, so I would approve of this rule.

[Malcador]

Characters are still, of course, limited by their max ranks in a skill; if a character would have invested in a skill anyway, this won't make their checks any higher. What it will do, however, is let each player have ranks in one or two skills they would ordinarily have ignored. For the party, this can mean added breadth (somebody gets a skill nobody would otherwise have had), or added redundancy (two people with ranks in some skill, instead of just one). Breadth lets the DM throw more varied encounters at the party, and redundancy helps the party when a player is missing or a character is incapacitated. Neither, however, meaningfully increases the party's power.

One side effect is that some prestige classes might be easier to qualify for, because skill ranks are used as an entry prerequisite. Here, still, it doesn't really allow for an early entry - it just makes entering at the same level take fewer resources.

Numerically, the classes it helps the most are those with 2+Int skill points per level. Of these, some are casters and some are martially inclined. The casters have ways to work around their low skill points, so they don't need this, but it doesn't give them much that they couldn't already do. The martial types (fighter and such) get a great benefit from this. This is okay, because those classes aren't very powerful. I doubt an extra skill point or two per level could push the fighter out of tier 5, for example.

[Cog]

It would be just as un-broken as giving everybody two extra skill points per level, unless the Dark Chaos Shuffle comes into play in your games. The only oddity for me is that it seems weirdly convoluted as opposed to just raising the class skill numbers.

[Person_Man]

There's a big difference between how this would work in 3.5 vs Pathfinder.

In 3.5, it's inefficient to take taking cross-class Skills, Skills are highly granular, most classes have very few Skill points per level. So at low levels, being a Skill Monkey is actually a valuable niche, assuming that your DM has encounters that can be resolved by Skills. (And even then, it's useful for Listen, Tumble, Hide, Move Silently, and Use Magic Device for combat). On the flip side, once you get to mid-high levels, most encounters that can be solved by Skills can be more efficiently solved by magic. So adding additional Skill Points would make Skill Monkeys less useful/valuable at low levels, and would make everyone slightly less dependent on magic at mid-high levels.

In Pathfinder, having a Skill as a class Skill only grants a +3 bonus, Skills have been somewhat consolidated, and most classes have at least 4 Skill points per level. So being a Skill Monkey is not really a Niche for any class most of the time. (Although I think the designers sometimes don't realize). So adding more Skill points won't really have much of an impact, other then making it easier for players to invest in a wider variety of lesser used Skills (Knowledges, Linguistics, etc).