When thickening a surface into a solid, the option exists to chain surfaces or pick an individual surface. In Inventor, the user has the ability to pick mulitple surfaces (which are tangent) without picking the entire chain.
A use case might be during the development of an overmolding process where the base geometry is offset up and away to give the overmold a uniform thickness. The overmold may not need to be a true offset from the surface and may have other details - so the need is there to offset many parts but not necessarily the entire surface.