TL;DR
Can you stack the advantages gained from assist actions?
Should you?
K, thnx bye~.
Just finished today’s tri-weekly session of Open Legend, and something very special happened during that session.
The Assist Action. A mechanic that is very often ignored, apparently not just by me but a lot of people as well.
But recently the assist action started getting a lot of love from me, my NPC’s and most importantly my players…
It all started a few sessions back when a reluctant NPC became an ally. Unwilling to help in combat as it goes against her codes as a journalist to play a role in the stories she covers, she opted to play the assist role instead. Literally, as from then on, the NPC ally would only participate in combat by making assist actions.
I can’t remember if it was me or my player who instigated this idea but someone during today’s session came up with a very novel idea that night with Assist Actions…
As you can guess… He wanted to stack them.
Though I doubt it’ll matter, we’re using that homebrew rule someone posted in the community one time about assist actions where the advantage you get is based on the attribute score.
So basically, it’s as you think. A character uses their assist action to grant advantage on an ally’s next action, and another character also makes an assist action to ‘stack’ the advantage. Ad infinitum.
As an example, during one of the combats that happened during that session, the player made his summoned creatures and the summoner himself make an assist action on another ally, granting that ally a total of advantage 8 (4 characters using attributes with scores of 5 and 4) on their next action. The assisted ally with the actual power of friendship at her side made a focus action to multi-attack one-shot the entire encounter, finishing the combat with ease and with style.
I personally have no problems with the idea, and her getting to 1 shot all the enemies were fine. That character in particular was already shown to have a knack for hoarde fighting and was even dubbed by us as “the multi-targeting queen” with how often she seemed to handle hoardes with relative ease. That encounter in particular was against a whole bunch of low HP low Defense minions that were all crammed so close to each other, they were practically begging for it.
If anything, I was happy, the player used strategy and planning to handle the encounter effectively, I’m proud.
My problem lies with my rulings.
THE QUESTION
Being able to stack assist advantages seems fine on paper, I doubt it could get out of hand (though that might be wishful thinking) but the fact of the matter is… As far as I know, that’s not how the rules go.
Quoting the core rules:
ASSIST AN ALLY
You can use your major action to assist an ally with an action roll if they are using an attribute you have
a score of 1 or greater in. The ally automatically gets advantage 1 on their roll.
Nothing about the wording suggests to me that they could be stacked. Nothing here suggests that they couldn’t either.
Using my intuition at the time, I ruled that assist actions could stack.
Is this an okay interpretation and fair ruling?
Assist actions is something the enemies can do, so if I ever find it bothersome, I can use the same tricks and have my enemies use assist actions as well I guess…
I can always veto if the player starts abusing and trying to get an army to assist him to get advantage 100 or something. The assist action homebrew we use still says something about the assist action needing to make sense anyways so there’s that.
Should Assist Actions not stack? If I allow it, maybe I should enforce a maximum advantage or maximum assisters?