Tonight I was writing a snail with my new Krone Hyperbole Merlot on Rhodia paper. The pen was not enjoying this at all. It was skipping and being naughty. I switched locations and happened to place a newspaper on the table so I would not ruin the wood surface. With the newspaper under my letter, the Krone wrote beautifully and did not skip at all.
Does anyone have any ideas about why this is happening? I have a theory but I am interested in hearing other viewpoints.

Baby-bottom nib. The soft backing allows the excessively curved nib surface to contact more paper.

Yep, baby-bottom nib.

Would that be the case even if this did not occur on any other paper other than the Rhodia? I have used this pen for an entire week with no signs of skipping at all except for the Rhodia paper.

It might be useful to add, large desk blotters used to be on every desk for a reason: using any metal-tipped pen, ballpoint, roller or fountain is not the greatest of ideas without some layers between the writing paper and the table desk surface.

When doing homework way back in the fifth grade, I once wrote with a ballpoint on my parents' nice pine dining-room table, with nothing under the sheet of paper. I think I did extra house chores for three months for that, and I can still read the words in the table now...

Funny! I have a pine dining table and it is beautiful but I have not seen it in decades because it lives under a very expensive custom made mat. If I had to buy that mat now, I couldn't afford what they would probably charge for it. It has been a shame to have a table hidden under a mat and a tablecloth all these years.
Getting back to my question, would a baby bottom nib be perfect on everything else and just balk at one type of paper?

I expect if it was borderline-good and borderline-bad, that the paper could be the difference. Either that or there's some kind of ink flow problem with the nib and feed somewhere.

It seems to me from reading some other paper reviews that the very smooth Clairefontaine and Rhodia are problematic with slight baby-bottoms. I don't know why that would be. Maybe there's no roughness in the paper to "reach up" and microscopically meet the nib halfway?

Playpen showed me the pen today at the Long Island show. There is no baby bottom and the tines are well spaced and well aligned. I tried it on my Rhodia pad and it wrote well. I suspect that if there is a problem, it could be the ink/paper/handwriting combination.