Assist

Assist

You can help someone achieve success on a skill check by making the same kind of skill check in a cooperative effort. As a standard action, you can assist an adjacent ally on a skill check by rolling a 10 + half the campaign level (round down, minimum 1) or higher on the same skill, and if successful, the character you're helping gets a +2 circumstance 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 (to a maximum of 5 characters assisting). Note that circumstance bonuses stack with all other bonuses including other circumstance bonuses.

Characters who fail the check instead inflict a -1 circumstance penalty to the check being made by the assisted character.

In cases where the skill restricts who can achieve certain results, such as trying to open a lock using Disable Device, you can't assist to grant a bonus to a task that your character couldn't achieve alone. The assist action cannot be used when making Diplomacy checks to negotiate prices with merchants, since ganging up on merchants will only result in the merchant bringing in friends of his own to assist him. The GM might impose further restrictions to assisting, on a case-by-case basis as well.

See also Aid Another (for granting bonuses to allies during combat).