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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5059099" data-attributes="member: 82106">No, you're taking a rule from the COMBAT chapter where there is an action, Aid Another, and applying it to a non-combat situation, a skill challenge. Actions apply to combat only. We've been using the term "Aid Another" as a convenient tag for this mechanism but more properly it is covered in the skill chapter in the topic "Cooperation". This topic clearly states that "In some situations" one PC can cooperate with another to provide a skill bonus. Its not a mechanism that PCs are universally entitled to. A player CANNOT assume that cooperation is always available.In non Group Skill Check situations the DM is perfectly within his or her rights to simply state that any characters using a skill need to make their own checks and that those checks count for success or failure. I don't even see how that fails to model cooperation in most cases. It just doesn't make the challenge easy cheesy and likely motivates unskilled PCs to try something different. Honestly how helpful is a fighter with no specialized knowledge of Arcana going to be to the wizard who is a master of Arcane knowledge? If I were working on a set of partial differential equations do you think the janitor is going to be helpful? (OK, maybe if he's the MIT janitor <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />). If the PCs are all trying to climb a cliff, sure, but that's the exact kind of situation where a GSC is appropriate.The whole point of discussing secondary skills was only to point out that any mechanism that lets a PC participate which isn't better than just using "Aid Another" might as well not exist if you assume you can always AA. The very existence of such things suggests that AA was not envisaged as being an option that was always available.See, this is the problem with your supposition about AA, the rest of the SC system simply makes no sense when you assume anyone can AA at any time in any challenge. Either its at the DMs discretion or the whole SC system is mostly nonsensical. Criticizing it on the basis of a rules interpretation that breaks it is well sort of just itself kinda nonsensical when you can simply not interpret the rules that way.</blockquote>

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