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Message: <blockquote data-quote="iserith" data-source="post: 7831088" data-attributes="member: 97077">There is nothing in the rules to my knowledge that states when an ability check occurs in relation to the game world because the ability check doesn't exist in the game world. An ability check resolves uncertainty as to the outcome of a task, when there is a meaningful consequence for failure. A character (or monster) does a thing. The DM isn't sure whether it is a success or failure and failure has some meaning. So he or she asks for an ability check. This part happens outside the context of the game world at no particular point in time in said world. Because of this, the caster or bard or whoever cannot pinpoint when a check will occur and thus can only affect tasks that begin and end within the duration of the spell or feature. For guidance, that's 1 minute. For bardic inspiration, that's 10 minutes.Though there is no explicit prohibition against spamming guidance (for example) working for tasks that take longer than a minute, this is implicit in the core resolution mechanic in my view. It simply doesn't make sense when taking the relationship between checks and tasks into consideration. And when it is taken into consideration, problems with guidance simply go away.If the character does not perform the necessary steps to perform a task, the task fails, sure. But characters aren't making ability checks - players are. The way you phrase this also indicates to me that your players may be asking to make ability checks which is common to tables that conflate the notion of tasks and checks and it is generally these tables that run into problems with guidance-spamming. Separating those two concepts, and not saying when an ability check occurs in the game world (because it doesn't exist there) makes it easy to see why guidance doesn't work that way.</blockquote>

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