preventing Me Too -ism

One of my pet peeves in RPGing is systems that encourage "me too"-ism. In other words, systems that encourage everyone rolling for the same thing, one at a time. Specifically in situations where it was one player's idea to do *action* and they have the best die pool for it, yet when they fail everybody else grabs dice and tries it, too, hoping dumb luck and law of averages will succeed where character creation failed.

The classic example is heavy lifting by means of a strength-check. Hercules and Einstein are standing see their escape route is blocked by a massive boulder. Hercules tries to roll it out of the way. He botches the roll, and fails. Einstein's player says "I'll try!" and rolls a critical success. (In D&D it's Herc gets a 1, and Einie gets a 20, but most dice systems have their own version of this disaster.) While on the surface both players are happy because they're escape route is clear, the truth is that Hercules' player is secretly resentful. He built a character designed to do this sort of brutishly heroic stuff, but he just got upstaged by a another character whose very concept stands at odds to this.

A good GM can reduce that pain - in this case, I'd narrate that Einstein didn't just push, he used physics and leverage to figure out the way to apply the least amount of force for the greatest payoff. While Herc was pushing the first time, Einstein was running equations and figuring the center of gravity of the object. But that kind of narrative smoothing-over doesn't always work, and often comes to mind 10 minutes after the point where you needed it.

So the first house rule I implement in any campaign is to take the existing cooperation or "aide another" bonuses of a game and double them, even if that stretches credibility slightly. The goal I'm aiming for is to make player's reactions be "can I help him?" instead of "can I upstage him?".

I've even been known to tell players "I'm sorry. You can't roll. We all know he's at least twice as strong as you, so you fail automatically." I don't like doing it that way: it's heavy-handed and manipulative. But generally speaking, I don't want the game to ground to a halt while everybody tries (in sequence) for a 1-in-a-million roll that lets them do the impossible at the expense of the one PC that was built to be in the spotlight this moment.