Why doesn't the help action have more limits and down sides?

[Tony Vargas]

Sounds good in theory. You must not have multiple "slow counters" at your table. Must be nice.

For checks, nope, pretty quick, but then I rarely pile on additional modifiers, so it's just roll die, add one number.

For damage...? ;(

I know rolling dice is fun, but it certainly isn't the only way to participate. "Clanky the Cleric, make the stealth roll - but before you do, the rest of you describe what you are doing to help Clanky be less, er, himself..." One might say this is allowing the players to be even more involved in the story than just rolling a die and adding a modifier. ...

Than /just/ making a die roll, sure, but it's obviously less involved than /also/ making a die roll... ::shrug::

 

[ClaytonCross]

Nod, I'd just as soon narrate success, at that point, or cut to the chase and have the roll determine not success/failure, but time (or some other resource) to accomplish.

I get your reasoning but I would offer an alternate point of view for consideration. D&D in my mind is not about completing quest A and moving to quest B the way MMOs now have way points that tell you where to go because someone made quest helper long ago. D&D to me is about the shared story and strategy and anytime you hand wave part of a story to get to another part of a story, it could be seen as a waste of "content". An example of that would be in Critical Role season 1 that doors become their Arche nemesis as a running joke. Watching the amount of time they spent on opening the crypt at WhiteStone was hilarious and a call back story they remember and referred to moving forward. So while their was no "need" for the test and it could have been hand waved, the failing forward and continuing adding of players to accomplish an otherwise mundane task can become a part of the story and fun in its own right. Sure if your players are getting annoyed and tired of it you can shut it down with a hand wave. "All your efforts have caused the door to weaken and break, it now swings open" or "You realize your efforts are in vain and your going to have to find another way". If however the players are into it and it has become a personal mission to open a door, a chest, push a bolder, climb a wall, let them run that story and stop when they are done one way or another.


That's just my take on it. If you have some goal for game progress over just playing around, you do you. I am just offering that multiple attempts at the same unimportant task can be just as interesting as planned important tasks.

 

[Tony Vargas]

D&D in my mind is not about completing quest A and moving to quest B the way MMOs now have way points that tell you where to go because someone made quest helper long ago.

You may or may not have gone on to make a worthwhile point, but if you feel the need to contrast your way with the straw man of D&D-as-MMO, you've lost my interest.

 

[hbarsquared]

Perhaps I'm late to the party, but in response to the OP:

1. a game is not Reality, and the Game does not need to reflect reality.
2. In combat, the cost is your action. The cost is accomplishing something you would otherwise be better at doing than helping someone else.
3. The Help action is defined as a combat action.
4. If you use it outside combat, you can simply assume it speeds up what would normally happen if the first PC attempted multiple checks, or...
5. Use your own house rules for something that wasn't designed for out of combat in the first place. Require proficiency from the helper, or the helper rolls the "second d20," or a penalty for failure. Doesn't matter, because you are outside the bounds of the rules anyway.

 

[ClaytonCross]

You may or may not have gone on to make a worthwhile point, but if you feel the need to contrast your way with the straw man of D&D-as-MMO, you've lost my interest.

If your more interested in saying I am wronge on the primise of my choice of example then content of the meaning of may arguement... You have lost my need to bother with clearifiying my point. lol

 

[MrHotter]

This is why I'm glad I read the message boards. I only knew about the Help action, and not the Working Together that is used outside of combat.

I listen to a podcast where every roll outside of combat is with advantage because they always have someone use Help.

"I'm going to search for food."
"I'm helping"

"I'm going to perform a song"
"I'm helping"

"I'm going to pick the lock"
"I'm helping"

Now that I know about the Working Together rule, I can see how the DM could have put restrictions on all of the checks if he had wanted.

At my table, I had already house ruled help outside of combat by making the helping player decide what they are doing to help and then making them roll a skill check against a DC number (that may be easier or harder than the DC number of the person being helped). If the helper rolls a 1 then the skill check automatically fails no mater what the player being helped rolls.

 

[Tony Vargas]

If your more interested in saying I am wronge on the primise of my choice of example

Not right or wrong, in whatever point you may have made, just undeserving of consideration because you crossed that line.

If you care to say something worthwhile, without misrepresenting a playstyle as "MMO like," feel free.

 

[iserith]

This is why I'm glad I read the message boards. I only knew about the Help action, and not the Working Together that is used outside of combat.

I listen to a podcast where every roll outside of combat is with advantage because they always have someone use Help.

"I'm going to search for food."
"I'm helping"

"I'm going to perform a song"
"I'm helping"

"I'm going to pick the lock"
"I'm helping"

Now that I know about the Working Together rule, I can see how the DM could have put restrictions on all of the checks if he had wanted.

I think the reason players are always quick with "I'm helping" is because there's no cost or risk to it. Adding restrictions to whether they can help or putting it behind an ability check doesn't necessarily solve the problem (if it's seen as a problem, that is) of players being quick with "I'm helping" because there's still no cost or risk to it. The specific requirements of Working Together only really shut out picking locks since to my knowledge that's the only thing that requires proficiency, so Working Together will work in most situations (provided the approach to the goal of helping is reasonably helpful). If Working Together comes at the cost of not performing some other useful task (like Keeping Watch), it starts to look less attractive. I'm not too keen on a general risk of hindrance rule, but something like that might also see a reduction in Working Together. In D&D 4e, for example, Aid Another required a DC 10 check which was pretty trivial to most characters unless they were untrained in the skill being used, but if you failed that check the person you were Aiding suffered a penalty to his or her roll instead.

What's also at play is that DMs are probably asking for too many ability checks. Helping becomes even more important to avoid a lot of failures per session. If there's no uncertainty as to outcome AND no meaningful consequence of failure, then the character just succeeds, no roll. If DMs just think about that a little harder during the game, the number of times they call for ability checks falls quite a bit in my experience and so might attempts to Work Together.

 

[5ekyu]

A real life situation that I have seen at the game table was two people trying to remember a game rule and one of them was on the right track and starting to remember but the other guy helping him went down the wrong thinking trail and the guy about to solve it got all mixed up.

I've seen the same thing happen in just about every other real life skill check type situation from stealth to climbing, often with some real hilarious results.

But something in real life is totally misrepresented in the game rules.

The help action doesn't require a roll of any sort so it's always successful and never hinders the character being helped and that's just flat out wrong. Now I'm not saying it should be all the other way either. Plenty of times getting help...works great!

I just find it so crazy that something so common place is so.......unrealistic.

Would it really be so unfun if the strength 6 wizard couldn't offer the 20 strength barbarian much help in the way of lifting that gate up by hand? Wouldn't instead it be amazing to see him try so hard and badly that the barbarian found it more difficult to do because of the kind Wizards(Help)?

Well to be fair within the rules there are by RAW two limitations already in place:
The Gm must determine it is a situation where the task can benefit from help.
The helper must also be able to perform the task alone "attempt" is the word used in fact but a Gm is well within the RAW to say a character "attepmt" doesn't count if they have zero chance of success.

So your 6 str wizard might not be able to help the lifting at all, if it is beyond his weight lift rules etc.

Now to the "should" and "fun" "unfun" opinion parts...

i can always see places here or there where "more detail for this specific scene" could add variety and truthyness to a scene. As Gm i have no problem throwing that in case-by-case when it is obviously needed. Following the lead-in of their thieves tools examples, i have zero problem ruling uncommon task X requires proficiency and so that limits help as well.

As for the possibility of negative results, nothing stops the Gm from still providing the flavor fluff adder stuff if the "low die" was bad... so the advantaged 17 and 2 roll gets the success off the 17 but the Gm (or the player) can add in fun and cool flubs for the weaker helper **especially if it is a fish out of water** moment. (One of my rules is to not use these flub flavor fluff on a character's strengths - only their weaknesses.) The flub fluff should be cosmetic and trivial as far as any in game effects go... ripped pants... pratfall - or whatever the player enjoys....

i had a character once with a low str character who very often channeled the old Lost in Space Doctor Smith "oh the pain" back pulls and muscle strains after any actual physical activity.

I would not recommend the idea of putting in too many coded and locked in negatives mechanically because frankly i like the fact that cooperating is a very common place thing now instead of the everyone rolls - as it provides solid benefit for working togteher and keeping the best at the task involved - instead of see who rolls the better dice randomness.

Too many negatives and the cost-benefit goes away vs the roll-offs.

Still, some options the Gm could reasonably add in are:

1 "Lesser of two Goods": When advantage is rolled for skill checks, the "weaker" participant rolls the task with advantage, not the stronger. this means someone close to your skill can help, but someone much worse at this can actually hurt. bad folks searching can destroy clues and get in the way of a search, folks moving around trying to see can make noise that hides an approaching enemy.

2 "I just know." Require proficiency to help - period - without proficiency you are just not consistently trained enough to be able to smoothly work with others - you do your own thing and it works out but that doesn't let your raw talent work well with others. its an instinct and feel thing, not formal training.

Either of these IMO could serve a Gm well if he saw a need to put a little more focus on the skills and aptitudes of the second best characters at a given task and make having two folks decent at a thing a very well rewarded thing.

 

[happyhermit]

"I'm helping" isn't enough in most situations IME, we usually want to establish what they are actually doing and how they think that might help, then the GM can decide if that: gives someone advantage, ends up being two different rolls, a group check, is just flavour, etc. It's partly a playstyle thing, similar to how some games have skills being rolled only when the GM calls for them while others have the players calling for rolls or just rolling. I find that (particularly out of combat) when the mechanics are a bit more in the background and the focus is on what the PCs are actually doing in fiction as opposed to what they are doing in the Meta sense, the results are pretty good.