Great thread!
Indeed this is all about being good players with a strong team spirit. I think it's a personal thing, some players still see the game as competitive, and they may
compete for spotlight.
In the real world what happens is players get bored and all want to roll for every skill check to see if they can out-cleric the cleric or out-sage the wizard. HAHA...my backwoods barbarian knew more about that book than your librarian!
Yeah and why does such player get bored? Excluding a rare case when the spotlight
really lasts too long and
everyone else gets bored, one player gets bored by someone else's spotlight mostly because he is someone who wants the spotlight on himself all the time.
Two of our best friends are just the type who do that. We can't play ANY games with them because, unless they are "winning", they start turning the game into farse. We have noticed many years ago they do the same thing also when an evening develops into a conversation they are not skilled at... we are all quite educated people who often embark in serious conversations about anything (be it scientific, artistic or humanistic). If we hit a subject where they seem to have troubles following up (e.g. physics or math) they start joking to ruin the conversation.
They're still our friends though, so we just learned that when they are around we have to accept that if we play a game with them we should not even bother playing seriously that night.
Personally, I don't like to block PCs out of skill checks - particularly when there's no specific reason that something should only be doable or known by someone with proficiency in the skill.
I feel safer using the opposite approach: I don't allow checks unless there is a specific reason that something should be doable or known by someone without proficiency.
Heh.
I actually have one about that issue.
Comedy is one of the hardest things, because breaking the 4th wall can sometimes be the highlight of the evening. By the same token though, stepping on someone else's big dramatic moment for the pop culture reference is not so great.
Is there better advice here than "read the room?" Is there a good rule of thumb for when-not-to-crack-wise?
The bitter (and somewhat trivial) truth is that the only thing that validates comedy is whether it made you laugh or not.
Should you crack a joke during someone's turn? If everyone laughs then yes, and I am pretty sure nobody's feelings will be hurt. If it leaves them cold, you should not. But how do you know beforehand? Well if one is not too young or too stupid, they should have at least figured out whether they have a good sense of humour or not.