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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Xeviat" data-source="post: 9507442" data-attributes="member: 57494">Hi everybody,I got curious and was unable to find statistics for group skill checks, so I made a table to help me understand the probabilities. I've never taken statistics, so I'm sure there was a mathematical way to do it, but I just put it together using <a href="https://anydice.com/" target="_blank">AnyDice</a> (brute force using the counting function). I've been thinking of ways to handle exploration, especially when everyone jumps in and wants to roll for the same thing, even if it wasn't what they were in the middle of (this has been a very common thing amongst my group of players). I was thinking of "minimizing" this behavior by functionally changing the Help action from advantage to making the check into a group check: for 2 characters working together on one task, it's functionally the same as advantage (except each rolls with their own skill bonus). My suspicion was this would drop the chances of success when 3 people jumped in to do the same thing, which I started calling the "Too Many Cooks" effect.Group skill checks require at least 50% of the party to succeed. That means 1/2, 2/3, 2/4, 3/5, and 3/6 for common party sizes. Odd numbers of PCs look like they'll make the checks harder, but how do the probabilities work out? Here's what I found:Party Size vs Roll Needed (or +0 vs DC ?)<table style='width: 100%'><tr><td>Party Size </td><td>5 </td><td>10 </td><td>15 </td><td>20 </td></tr><tr><td>1 </td><td>80.00% </td><td>55.00% </td><td>30.00% </td><td>5.00% </td></tr><tr><td>2 </td><td>96.00% </td><td>79.75% </td><td>51.00% </td><td>9.75% </td></tr><tr><td>3 </td><td>89.60% </td><td>57.48% </td><td>21.60% </td><td>0.73% </td></tr><tr><td>4 </td><td>97.28% </td><td>75.85% </td><td>34.83% </td><td>1.40% </td></tr><tr><td>5 </td><td>94.21% </td><td>59.31% </td><td>16.31% </td><td>0.12% </td></tr><tr><td>6 </td><td>98.30% </td><td>74.47% </td><td>25.57% </td><td>0.22% </td></tr></table>Unless I've coded things incorrectly, it looks like my assumption was right. Moving from 4 to 5 players does drop the probabilities. Also, group skill checks become harder than individual checks once you have 3 or more PCs and the chances are below 50%. 2 is always better than 1, but things drop from there.So, this looks like you'll want to stick with relatively easy DCs for group skill checks, as Ability/Skill bonuses can be as low as -1 throughout the whole game. But, this does support my desire to make this change, along with letting the players know that 2 is the best number to work on a single issue.Does this reflect project work to you like it does to me?</blockquote>

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