My group just started playing 5th last night, and we immediately ran into issues with the 'Working Together'/'Skill Assist'/'Skill Help' rules. By the rules it seems like nearly every single skill roll should be made with advantage, but logically that doesn't seem right.
The rules about working together and skill assists seem pretty light, and we couldn't find any extra information. This is the entirety of the assistance/help rules for skill checks:
Working Together
Sometimes two or more characters team up to attempt a task. The character who’s leading the effort—or the one with the highest ability modifier—can make an ability check with advantage, reflecting the help provided by the other characters. In combat, this requires the Help action (see chapter 9). A character can only provide help if the task is one that he or she could attempt alone. For example, trying to open a lock requires proficiency with thieves’ tools, so a character who lacks that proficiency can’t help another character in that task. Moreover, a character can help only when two or more individuals working together would actually be productive. Some tasks, such as threading a needle, are no easier with help.
From this description, it seems like anyone can help anyone else with nearly anything, as long as each person could technically attempt the task (not necessarily ever succeed), and two people could reasonably be productive at the task. To us, it was difficult to find tasks at which two players could not be at least a little bit more productive when working together. Even discounting some of the more obtuse approaches to assisting (like coaching someone on stealth or encouraging someone to be a better liar), many of the core skills seem like they would always fit in this:
- Perception – Having two people looking around is always going to be better than one. Maybe I can't see as well as the elf (maybe my perception skill is -3 and I have sand in my eyes), but I can look around and report what I do see.
- Investigate – if you can read, you should be able to at least help someone pour through reference material. I'm not an expert at ancient dwarven civilization, but I can look through this book about them and tell you what I find.
- Arcana – It's DnD. Magic is everywhere. Everyone should be able to assist everyone else at least a little bit in magic. Maybe I don't know how to cast that fireball spell, but someone shot a fireball at me once, so I'm at least aware of its existence and properties.
- History – We all know some history. I might not know the specific battle you're talking about, but I know that the victorious general eventually became the emperor.
- Insight – Unless you're dealing with a specific example that only the person making the skill check would know, then other people can at least offer some insight. I may not have a lot of insight into which painting would be the most valuable, but I know that bigger is usually more expensive.
Keep in mind that the rules never state how proficient or good with the skill you have to be to assist. You could conceivably have the worst perception in the entire universe, but still assist a world class perceptor because a) you could attempt the perception on your own, and b) two sets of eyes are better than one.
In out game, it ended up that every time someone made a skill check of any kind, they just announced it and waited for someone else to say 'I'll assist.'
Wizard: "I want to look at this spell and see if I know where it's from"
Fighter: "I'll assist"
Wizard rolls with advantage
Rogue: "I'll look out this window to assess any threats"
Warlock: "I'll assist"
Rogue rolls with advantage
Bard: "I want to use insight to determine how this magical cloak is built"
Silence due to other players not paying attention
Bard: "Ahem…"
Monk: "Oh right, sorry, I assist."
Bard rolls with advantage
Given the 'Working Together' rules, I can't see how any of these situations would be invalid. It seems like as long as there is at least one other person in the room, regardless of their skill level or knowledge or experience, you should always be rolling skill checks with advantage. This sounds incorrect, but we couldn't find any rules against it.
Question:
Is this how skill assists are supposed to work? And if not, where in the rule book does it explain the nuances of the assist action?
Best Answer
This is how skills are supposed to work!
If you are in a situation where there is only one person doing something, and they are rolling a single skill check, then yes, this is how it's supposed to work. Giving help is a natural thing and should be used in situations like this. There is no reason to prevent it unless the task is clearly something that's not going to benefit from someone else giving you assistance. There are some things you can do to limit it.
It's also worth noting that helping can often save you some table time. As a AceCalhoun points out in the comments, in many cases what happens if you don't help is that everyone in the party tries their hand at the task. This behaves very much like advantage, but with a slightly lower overall modifier (because most likely you'll have one character who is good at a task and the rest that are lower). So Working together only raises the change of success slightly and consumes less table time in these cases.
Be a bit more stringent about what you allow for assistance. Is coaching stealth really all that helpful? do you really want someone looking/talking over your shoulder while you're picking that lock? Evaluate situations where characters attempt to aid more carefully.
Have more than one thing going on at once. If all the characters need to be stealthy, they can't be helping each other. And if you need two arcane characters working on the sigils on opposite sides of the room, maybe they have to choose which one gets help from the third (or don't have anyone to help at all).
Make things take multiple rolls and limit helping on all of them. Maybe the first roll the wizard can be helped, but after that he's on the other side of the trap, or arm deep in the sigil or something to where additional assistance isn't going to help him.
Figure out how to inflict disadvantage for the task. Maybe there are mitigating circumstances.
Create a distraction. A rogue can't help the wizard if he's busy fighting baddies. Make some skill checks happen in an occupied room. Make completing the skill checks the win condition rather than defeating the enemies.
The basic crux of all of this is that helping is supposed to a mundane task that provides advantage. Yes, that's a huge deal, but it also doesn't stack with other things that give you advantage and it can be easily cancelled by disadvantage.
So get creative! Build some situations into your adventures that prevent your heroes from helping each other (or make the opportunity cost higher). But don't do it all the time, that might get tiresome. Adventurers like to help each other out, let them, but don't make it easy all the time.