CapnZapp
Legend
I don't normally worry too much about rules. If the game is fun I tend to accept it, warts included. But in my regular campaign a player has exposed something I did not see before: the help action seems really over powered. The character is a wizard with a familiar. The familiar basically uses the Help action all the time, granting the wizard Advantage on most actions. In combat, the familiar grants one of the main combatants Advantage.
Help does not require a roll. There are no prerequisites for Helping on any given action. For the low low cost of a find familiar spell, the wizard is able to bypass the series of choices that make Advantage possible.
Thoughts?
Outside of combat, Working Together
The cause here is that there's no cost. The helping character would otherwise have done nothing.
Help outside of combat absolutely needs to be removed. The other alternative, constructing challenges so that every character always has something worthwhile to do is an example of making the DM do work to cover up deficiencies in the rules, and why would anyone ever want to do that? Much easier to just remove OOC help.
Inside combat, or at any other time where the cost (spending your own action) is significant, help is not broken. It is almost never worth abstaining your own attack or spell just to make sure your ally succeeds. The best tactic is for the ally to simply try again and again, and eventually succeed on his or her own.
As for the familiar issue: just have your monsters ruthlessly kill off the familiar in each and every combat until the player stops trying to get cheesily cheap advantage, and there's no problem.
So the main issue is out of combat. Just don't allow characters working together to gain advantage except in very special circumstances.
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