Quote from: Dodger;535907The GM has to use his judgment.

We'll have no more of this heresy, vile one! A rule for everything, and for everything a rule. So let it be written - so let it be done.

Quote from: One Horse Town;535691To explain what i mean here, i'll take you to the accident & emergency ward. A group of doctors are trying to 'heal' a patient. The best doctor fails his heal roll. All the other people there (some of whom are just folk that have seen Casualty on t.v) put their hands up and shout, "i'll try!"

There are three problems here and it may be useful to understand them separately:

(1) There's the metagaming issue. If the thief rolls a 30 to search a room and the GM says "you didn't find anything", that guy doesn't pipe up to say "I'll try". It's only when the thief muffs his roll and fails to find something that the rest of the party uses that metagame knowledge to have someone else make the check.

(2) There's the balance issue. This is particularly true in systems where the range of the die roll is larger than the skill bonuses. For example, if the target number is 15, most skill bonuses are +1 to +5, and you're rolling a d20... Letting everybody roll and then taking the best roll makes skill almost entirely irrelevant.

This is something that comes up quite bit when trying to use stealth in D20: Sneaking past large groups of people becomes almost impossible unless your stealth skill is an order of magnitude larger. (Longer discussion here.)

(3) There's the pacing issue. Is it really interesting to have everyone sit there sequentially rolling this check? Or would it make more sense to have everyone roll simultaneously and/or make a single check for the whole group and call it a day?

Quote from: Benoist;535799If you are systematically using the highest skill in the group for cooperative tasks...

I think you're talking about something different from the OP: He's talking about a non-cooperative task being attempted sequentially ("he'll search the room, then I'll search the room, then she'll search the room"); I think you're talking about cooperative tasks like "we're trying to climb this wall, so we'll just make a group check using the highest roll".

QuoteAnd let me stress, this is not "weird" or "cheating", it's normal: it's basically what the house rule encourages them to do, so it's natural for them to think about this this way.

In non-cooperative tasks -- like the ones the OP was talking about -- it's what ANY reasonable rule system is going to do. It's the way reality works: The best trained guy attempts the task.

It sounds like there's two overlapping but not really identical situations being talked about in this thread:

- Multiple people pitching in on the same skill check attempt and collaborative mechanics like that. I'm down with these provided the logic of the in-game situation supports them. If only one character has the electronics skill they're the only one who's going to be able to make the "design a circuit board" skill check, but if you're talking about a "smash a large amount of electronic equipment" check then sure, let everyone pitch in.

- People lining up for the skill roll conga line, with the less skilled characters attempting the roll in question after the specialist has failed. Again, if it makes sense in game for this to be allowed, I allow it, but actually that's a lot rarer than it sounds - it really only happens if the situation isn't time critical and if there aren't any consequences for failure. If the situation is time critical and the specialist fails, well, they did their best but they ran out of time; likewise, if there's consequences for failure (the lock breaks, the patient dies, the alarm goes off, whatever) then it's no longer appropriate to be making that skill check anyway because the situation's moved on. For actions where there's no real consequences to failure and no time constraint, I'm inclined to let PCs with the appropriate skills just plain succeed without rolling, because if there's no pressure and you can fail over and over again until you get it right eventually there's no interest to be gained from rolling the dice on it.

It's worth noting, of course, that in some systems making skill rolls is the primary way to advance skills, so if you're going to be hardline on this you might want to have the option of letting players train each other in downtime if a particular player is desperate to learn (for example) the Surgery skill but never gets an opportunity to attempt surgery because the specialist always does it.

Quote from: JAThere are three problems here and it may be useful to understand them separately:

(1) There's the metagaming issue. If the thief rolls a 30 to search a room and the GM says "you didn't find anything", that guy doesn't pipe up to say "I'll try". It's only when the thief muffs his roll and fails to find something that the rest of the party uses that metagame knowledge to have someone else make the check.

(2) There's the balance issue. This is particularly true in systems where the range of the die roll is larger than the skill bonuses. For example, if the target number is 15, most skill bonuses are +1 to +5, and you're rolling a d20... Letting everybody roll and then taking the best roll makes skill almost entirely irrelevant.

This is something that comes up quite bit when trying to use stealth in D20: Sneaking past large groups of people becomes almost impossible unless your stealth skill is an order of magnitude larger. (Longer discussion here.)

(3) There's the pacing issue. Is it really interesting to have everyone sit there sequentially rolling this check? Or would it make more sense to have everyone roll simultaneously and/or make a single check for the whole group and call it a day?

I really think this touches on a number of good points. I want to add onto the first point of Justin's that I (as GM) still roll many of what I call "Hidden Outcome" rolls for the players becasue of this.  I try to let them rol whenever I can, but whenever a player's good or bad roll might damage the versimilitude, I try to roll for them.

Also, this conversation has touched on the scale of the variability and this needs to be touched on again.  And not just that d20 vs d100 has less room to move due to gradation, but the room for enviromantel contect modifiers and skill growth change as well.