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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 ?

  1. Do its bonus stack with Aid Another's not-circumstancial bonus ?
  2. 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

Community
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Trajan
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    By all mean NOT an official source, but you can have a thread in paizo forums just here. You can find a more detailed explanation on the "twice-the-fast" interpretation in this post, which I agree with. – MACN Nov 15 '13 at 15:07
  • The real benefit of cooperative crafting is that it explicitly allows multiple magic crafting types to bring the prerequisites to bear on the project. If you only rely on aid another, only the main crafter is allowed to provide prerequisite spells, and many rulings I've seen disallow aid another altogether on magic item crafting. –  Apr 23 '17 at 00:55

2 Answers2

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Do its bonus stack with Aid Another's not-circumstancial bonus ?

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.

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 twister way of reading "double the gp value you can craft each day") ?

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.

Why is Cooperative Crafting a feat?

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.

KRyan
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    One minor improvement with the feat over Aid Another, though I don't know how often it comes up in Pathfinder is this line - "either one of you can fulfill any other prerequisites for crafting the item.". This means if there are two potential crafters, one who has a better crafting check and another who has a requisite but a worse check, with just Aid Another the lead would have to be the latter with the former only granting +2, while with the feat the better crafter can lead despite lacking the requisite that the weaker crafter can cover (and still give +2 or +4). – Lunin Nov 17 '13 at 04:32
  • @Lunin In 3.5, that sort of cooperation was the default; you didn’t need a feat for it. And I don’t think it should have been a thing that needed a feat. So... – KRyan Nov 17 '13 at 06:18
  • @KRyan It's the default in Pathfinder too, so that line in the feat is pretty much just a very poorly worded reminder text. – Matthew Najmon Nov 17 '13 at 19:12
  • @KRyan About your line "this is known as the Same Source limitation": say you have two people helping you with Cooperative crafting, what is the source ? Is it the feat, so you gain a +2 bonus, or are they the people helping, so you get +4 ? – Trajan Nov 18 '13 at 11:38
  • @Trajan That... is ambiguous. If it were a spell effect (or anything like a spell effect), it would clearly not stack as the “source” is the spell, rather than the caster. But for a feat... I’m not sure it’s ever defined. I’d probably allow the bonus to stack but not the speed increase, personally, regardless of what RAW or RAI might be. – KRyan Nov 18 '13 at 15:50
  • Just one note about Aid Another, from the Aid Another description: (You can't take 10 on a skill check to aid another.) This basically forces you to always roll, so there is always a chance you could roll fail if you don't have +20 on the skill. – Constablebrew Dec 19 '13 at 20:18
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    @Constablebrew True, but you only need +9, not +20. The DC for Aid Another is 10, and at a minimum you roll a 1 (and nat-1s on skill checks are not automatically failures), so 1+9=10. – KRyan Dec 19 '13 at 20:54
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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") ?

Actually, this is a tie into this line from Magic Item Creation:

Creating an item requires 8 hours of work per 1,000 gp in the item's base price (or fraction thereof), with a minimum of at least 8 hours. Potions and scrolls are an exception to this rule; they can take as little as 2 hours to create (if their base price is 250 gp or less). Scrolls and potions whose base price is more than 250 gp, but less than 1,000 gp, take 8 hours to create, just like any other magic item. The character must spend the gold at the beginning of the construction process. Regardless of the time needed for construction, a caster can create no more than one magic item per day. This process can be accelerated to 4 hours of work per 1,000 gp in the item's base price (or fraction thereof) by increasing the DC to create the item by 5.

And the following line:

The caster can work for up to 8 hours each day.

Meaning that Cooperative Crafting allows one to craft an item of 1,000+ GP in half the time, with two characters working on it. Sadly, it doesn't give a ruling on multiple characters (For example., two plus the original crafter) with CC working in concert and what that would do.

Dilaculo
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    I believe the standard multiplier stacking rules from 3.x still apply in Pathfinder. So two assistants with this feat would triple the speed of the work. – Theo Brinkman Jan 27 '15 at 15:58