The Cooperative Crafting provides a +2 circumstance bonus when two people with this feat work together.
Benefit: You can assist another character in crafting mundane and
magical items. You must both possess the relevant Craft skill or item
creation feat, but either one of you can fulfill any other
prerequisites for crafting the item. You provide a +2 circumstance
bonus on any Craft or Spellcraft checks related to making an item, and
your assistance doubles the gp value of items that can be crafted each
day.
One can also Aid Another:
You can help someone achieve success on a skill check by making the same kind of skill check in a cooperative effort. If you roll a 10 or higher on your check, the character you're helping gets a +2 bonus on his or her check. (You can't take 10 on a skill check to aid another.) In many cases, a character's help won't be beneficial, or only a limited number of characters can help at once.
Since a DC 10 is easy to pull off (even at level 1, with Skill Focus and crafting being a class skill for (almost ?) every class), what are the advantages of Cooperative Crafting ?
- Do its bonus stack with Aid Another's not-circumstancial bonus ?
- What does mean "your assistance doubles the gp value of items that can be crafted each day" ? Do you craft twice faster (thanks to a very twisted way of reading "double the gp value you can craft each day") ?
A bit of context and remarkable and divergent related answers to my other question, especially MACN's
Best Answer
Yes. They are bonuses of different types, and therefore stack. Untyped bonuses always stack with all sorts of typed bonuses, and also with most other sorts of untyped bonuses (the exception being that a bonus will not usually stack with itself if you would be entitled to it more than once, even if the bonus is untyped; this is known as the Same Source limitation). They could have made it an exception if they wanted by explicitly saying it does not stack with Aid Another, but that would be pointless. Thus someone using Aid Another while having the feat effectively doubles the bonus that they offer.
That’s precisely what it means. Actually, you craft a little more than twice faster because you are hitting a higher DC thanks to the feat’s +2 circumstance bonus, but that particular line doubles your speed compared to if that line was not there. Your progress on any crafted item is measured in silver; when the silver value of your work crafting the item is equal to the value of the item in silver, you are done. If your crafting checks produce twice as much silvers’ worth of progress, then you will meet the item’s value in half the time.
A good question; to my mind it’s not very good design. Aid Another was already sufficient, I think, to model someone helping you out. If anything, I would have made this sort of bonus contingent on hitting higher DCs with your Aid Another roll (since, as you say, DC 10 is remarkably easy to hit), and for having both people have the relevant feat. This seems like an unnecessary feat tax to me, even if the effect is reasonably good.
On the other hand, I’m not too familiar with Pathfinder’s options in this regard, but if there are enough effects out there that stack and reduce crafting times or crafting costs, that can lead to very overpowered characters if they can get them all (see 3.5’s Artificer). Which makes me leery of an effect that doubles crafting speed, particularly when you don’t need to take the feat yourself; a cohort could take it, you could hire an NPC who has it, or whatever. Alone, this feat is fairly week. In combination with other, similar feats, it might be overpowered. Which again would just lead me to wanting to have a lesser effect, achieved just by hitting higher DCs than 10 on Aid Another.