Coriolis: The Third Horizon

[aramis erak]

It should be noted that this is released from the Free League Workshop, which is basically Free League's version of the DM's Guild.

A polite way to say, "It's not official, and probably not canonical, either..."

 

[Yora]

I've been thinking about situations where characters can try making a skill roll only once, but all characters can make an attempt. These situations never sit right with me in RPGs. I was considering allowing characters to try where others already failed only if they have a higher skill rank or more dice total for the roll, but that only makes it mechanically more efficient to always have the least skilled characters go first when time or alarms are not an issue.

But as an alternative idea, what about letting characters try a second time when another character joins in to help? Say the engineer isn't able to repair a damaged gun and a deckhand offers to help. Instead of the deck hand making a Technical roll to repair the gun himself, the engineer gets to make another roll but with a +1 bonus from the help.
This does mechanically encourage that characters should always try the roll alone first before accepting help (unless there's only one chance anyway), but that doesn't really seem that strange narratively.

However, the best expert trying again with a bonus will have a much higher chance of success than the assistant trying to do it alone. But I am not sure if that would be much of a bad thing.
As another alternative, a less skilled charcter could make a new attempt at a task that a more skilled character already failed, but only if that expert is helping with the roll. That would almost be the same procedure as the game already had by default, except that the expert in the party can't run of doing other things. When trying to treat an injury or repair a ship module during combat, the medic or engineer being occupied for another turn wouldn't be an insignificant price.

What do others think of this?