It occurs to me that open rolls are mostly a thing because it’s fun to roll dice, and character sheets are a thing because players like to optimise. It’s be fun to have a system where the rolls and player stats are hidden information and the players only have perception of how good their character is at stuff from the outcomes of their choices - like you can have a full-on Dunning Kruger wizard in your party, or be totally unaware that your barbarian has an innate skill for music.
I mostly remember the events from the 1s I have rolled. 20s fade into insignificance
So it’s nice when die rolls are open, do everyone can share in the expectation
Not going to lie, this sounds like a fun game.
If your group has the trust, there is something to be said for making all rolls GM rolls. The GM is going to tell you how it turns out anyway so why not just make them roll? Let them handle the mechanical elements of the game so the players can focus on the role play.
I used to play when the basic D&D was out, we rolled. Later in highschool we had this amazing story telling dramatic DM, he did all the dicerolls. At first it felt odd, but since he kept the story moving it let you focus on group communication and your own role play.
The modern game is so much simpler than the old ones. I’m so glad to see the back of THAC0
For me as a GM this is a nightmare scenario. You want me to not only manage story, NPCs, physics, metaphysics, narrative cohesion, pacing, world building, encounter design and scheduling, I now have to make your rolls too? Miss me with that shit.
I would turn this around: If there is trust [to not meta game] there is no need for the GM to make any rolls or have hidden stat blocks for any NPCs. This way the GM can focus more on roleplay.
This. In fact wishing I had someone dedicated to managing the rolls and mechanics is why I paid for a program that did it all for me. I have not important things to remember than the ac and HP of half a dozen goblins, three wolves, a bugbear, a druid who forgot she could shape shift, a wizard who can’t remember what spells they have and a dragonborn barbarian whi forgot what his breath weapon was. You want me to look up each characters stats for each roll too!? How about everyone is responsible for keeping track of their own shit while juggle an entire worlds worth of flaming adventure in front of you. If you can’t be trusted to play fair then suffer the consequences of everyone’s ire, and my surprise mind flayer to your shenanigans. You’re characters brain is mine now
There is approximately zero weight to being the roller. If the added task of rolling a die you would normally ask them to roll is going to be the straw to break your back, you’re probably dealing with something else.
Well but it’s not just the rolling is it? And it’s not just “a die”. Its ALL the dice. And not just the ones I would ask them to roll, but the ones they’d normally roll unquestioned. And all their class feats and modifiers and Free Rerolls and on and on and on. Either the GM has all that data (and must therefore manage it) when making a roll or he has to request the mechanical data from the players, which is just as immersion breaking and way more time consuming.
I like making the math rocks go clicky clack though
The math has been within you the whole time, my boy. The rocks do nothing.
If your group has the trust
This is the heart of tons of table drama. The DM wants to tell a story and the players want to be heroic. The dice add randomness that can add drama, but they also cause chaos by introduction outcomes people don’t want.
If you’re just trusting the DM, why have rolls at all? Just tell GM what you’re doing and GM tells you what happens. But then players feel like they’ve got less heroic agency. They’re not pulling together a brunch of cool traits to do something risky and daring. They’re saying “I leap over the battlement and drive my spear into the champion’s throat” and the DM either says “Yeah” or “Nah”. You need phenomenal trust in your GM for that to work. A bunch of 12 year olds at a table aren’t going to have that.
Let them handle the mechanical elements of the game so the players can focus on the role play.
The mechanics are, ostensibly, there to facilitate the roleplay. The paladin’s smite isn’t just a set of numbers, it’s an expression of their role as holy warrior and divine judge.
That’s why you would keep the randomness of the dice, but isolate it. It’s easy to trust a DM to be reasonable when it comes to some things, but the randomness is useful in making the play more interesting, and people aren’t great at creating statistically distributed randomness. And if your DM is just looking at the die and saying, ‘yah’ or ‘nah,’ they shouldn’t be your DM. If your players can’t handle being told their characters’ attack didn’t land, they aren’t ready to play the game. It isn’t possible to win or lose DnD, but it’s absolutely possible to succeed or fail to play.
And you wouldn’t be removing the mechanical elements, such as the smite, just putting player focus on the diegetic space. They can still smite, but with their attention spent on thinking about the righteous smash of their weapon against the enemy’s armour and less on going ‘okay, then we carry the one, and…’
This sounds like a “GM is the entertainer” thing to me.
Either you think doing rolls is a mechanical burden that strips away immersion and reduces fun. In this case making the GM do all the rolls does the same to them and why would that be ok?
Or you don’t think rolling all the dice is a burden for the GM. Well then it wouldn’t be a burden for the players to do it either.
There are systems that are all player facing (players make all the rolls), but I’ve never heard of the system that expects the GM to make all the rolls.
I’ll be going to my first dnd session next weekend. Can someone explain why metagaming bob doesn’t like this regulation?
Edit: Thank you everyone! Great explainations.
Bob presumably has been using player knowledge to inform character decisions in a way the group doesn’t like.
For example, illusions may require a wisdom check to realize they’re not real. When Bob rolls openly on the table and gets a 1, he decides as a player that his character is going to treat the lava monsters as illusions. If he instead had to roll in the opaque jar, he as a player would be less certain about if they’re illusions or real.
Bob: “Do I see anything?”
[Rolls a 1]
DM: “You see nothing”
Bob: “Well, DM probably only said that because of my shit roll, I bet there’s something here”
Metagaming is broken into two halves. There’s the acceptable “suspend your disbelief” type of metagaming, where the entire table just sort of agrees that certain things (like a character being able to hike miles at a time while carrying 300 pounds of gear, just because they have a good Strength stat) is a perfectly normal thing. When people discuss metagaming, that’s usually not what they’re referring to.
When people discuss metagaming, they’re usually referring to when the player acts on knowledge that their character doesn’t have. For instance, maybe the player has already read/played the module before, so they know where all of the traps in a dungeon are. And maybe they take a route through the dungeon that conveniently avoids or bypasses every single trap. It’s one of those things that’s difficult for the DM to police, because delineating the difference between “the player got lucky/had a suspicion because of something I said when describing the room” vs “the player already knows what is going to happen” would require mind-reading. And notably, the only person who enjoys this type of metagaming is the metagamer. If the DM and the metagamer are the only ones who know the module, the metagamer is ruining a lot of the suspense and potential dramatic twists for the rest of the players at the table.
Wisdom governs a lot of “I want to find out something about the environment/this NPC” skills. Perception, Insight, Animal Handling, and Survival can all be used to notice things in different scenarios, (notice a trap, catch a lie, intuit an animal’s intentions, follow a trail in the wilderness, etc,) and all of them are governed by Wisdom. The only real exception is Investigation, which is governed by Intelligence. But Intelligence is mostly focused on “you remember this thing” skill checks, rather than “you notice this thing” skill checks.
As a result, Wisdom checks are often targets for metagaming. For instance, Perception allows you to detect things like traps or environmental details that would otherwise go unnoticed. Maybe a treasure chest has a false bottom, with extra loot hidden below it. The metagamer has already read the module and knows about the false bottom. And the metagamer will usually try to find ways to “force” certain results that they want, or will blatantly act on knowledge that their character wouldn’t have.
In the above “treasure chest with a secret compartment” example, maybe the metagamer (knowing there is loot under a false bottom) says they want to thoroughly search the chest. The DM calls for a Perception check as they rifle through the contents. The metagamer rolls, and the entire table can see that it is low. The metagamer knows they failed the Perception check. But they still want the loot at the bottom of the chest. So they say something like “when I don’t find anything worthwhile, I smash the chest in frustration.”
Now the DM is in a tricky spot. Do they reward the player and reveal that by smashing the chest, the player finds extra loot hidden in a secret compartment? Or do they try to punish the metagaming by saying that they find a bunch of smashed (now worthless) loot in what used to be a secret compartment? It’s a judgement call on the DM’s part, because the DM can’t read the player’s mind to know if they were trying to metagame.
For another example, maybe an NPC tells a lie. The metagamer asks if the NPC is lying. The DM calls for an Insight check. The metagamer sees the low roll, and the DM says the NPC seems to be telling the truth. Now the metagamer is in a spot where they (as the player) don’t believe the DM. But the metagamer’s character believes the lie, because they failed the Insight check. Now the metagamer may try to find ways to circumvent that failed Insight roll, by finding other ways to catch the NPC in a lie. Maybe they try to poke holes in the NPC’s story using History, Religion, Arcana, Nature, and/or Investigation (all governed by Intelligence) checks instead. Or maybe they go out of their way to find evidence that would disprove the lie. Even though their character would have no reason to do so, because their character believes the lie.
By hiding Wisdom checks from the players, it helps eliminate a lot of metagaming. Especially in the last example. If the Insight check was hidden from the player, the player wouldn’t know if they failed the check. So they just have to take the DMs word when they say the NPC seems to be telling the truth. It eliminates the entire “player saw the low roll and doesn’t believe the DM” part of things.
So first off, Meta-gaming in DnD is a bit weird. It’s both acceptable and not acceptable, depending on the limitations therein. Like it is technically metagaming to have one PC trust another after just meeting in the game for the first time but this is not just acceptable but actively encouraged in some games because you don’t want to draw out being untrustworthy of your party in the first session when the whole goal is to play together.
But the flipside is bad metagaming like if you read a module ahead of time, have information about that and then use that to take actions like fetching a bad guys bugout bag and investigating a specific wall to see through the illusion (Fuck you, you giant turtle asshole… sorry. Bad experience) then that is just you being shitty because you’re not really playing the game. This is taken a step further with dice rolls. You may or may not notice that some DMs will ask for a specific DC and other ones will just ask for a roll and then tell you if you succeeded/failed after the fact. The ones who ask for it after the fact have typically dealt with a lot of Metagaming Bobs. People who, when they hear a specific DC, will roll just barely that DC or roll to beat it. Especially if it is a big and important roll. They don’t want the dice to tell the story, they just want to win. They don’t understand the game. To them it’s being the hero or succeeding everytime so they’ll lie about the dice rolls.
Metagaming bob is upset in this instance because the DM has elected to have all players roll in a specific thing so that only the DM can see the roll. That way only the DM knows whether they succeeded or failed. Bob feels like his agency has been taken away and he doesn’t trust the DM. He thinks the DM will just lie about the rolls because Bob can’t understand playing the game in any way other than how he sees it. He is mentally accusing the DM of doing what he does. So when he says that there is a problem, the DM knows that he has caught Bob.
From this point, Bob will typically flame out of the party. He will get upset about something and either be pushed out by all other players and the DM or just leave himself. Less often, Bob starts to learn the error of his ways and accepts the dice as the true storytellers and all of us just along for the ride.
I hope that helps and I hope that you have a fantastic session next weekend! May you always roll with advantage and the dice be forever in your favor <3
I took it another way, where Wisdom specifically controls skills like Perception, Insight, and Animal Handling. Basically, skills that allow your character to notice or intuit things about the environment/NPCs.
Let’s say an NPC tells a lie, and you ask whether or not they’re lying. The DM asks you to roll an Insight check, and see that you rolled a 1. This means you (as the player) know you can’t trust when the DM says the NPC is being truthful. But your character believes the NPC, because you obviously failed the Insight roll. And that’s where the metagaming comes into play, with the player finding alternative ways to be able to act on what they believe was a lie, even though their character believes something to be a truth.
By hiding the Insight roll from the players, it obfuscates the pass/fail, and eliminates the entire “player knows someone was lying but their character doesn’t” metagame.
And that’s where the metagaming comes into play, with the player finding alternative ways to be able to act on what they believe was a lie, even though their character believes something to be a truth.
My favorite solution to this comes from Fate’s compels. In short, you bribe the player with the equivalent of Inspiration for buying in.
So, yeah, maybe the NPC is lying, but I can invoke their “Very Trustworthy” aspect, because the dice said they’re coming off as very trustworthy, and you get a nice shiny fate point so long as you go along with it.
It can channels the metagamer’s desire to win in a more story friendly direction.
…individual game systems vary, but fifth-edition D+D was designed with many mechanics which depend upon open rolls with secret modifiers: if your players’ characters can perceive an action taking place, roll openly; if they can’t, invert the roll (DC-12 modifier) and roll secretly against their passive scores…
My DM last week decided to have this weird fucky thing in the area that we were at. Some fucky wucky magic that was making it so after every roll (except for attacks) the DM made another roll to determine odds or evens. If it was evens, your roll worked as normal. If it was odds, your roll was reversed so that your nat 20 would become a nat 1. But that also meant if you ended up with a nat 1 and he rolled an odd, you’d get a nat 20. This happened twice. We were all laughing nonstop because like… none of us could have metagamed it if we wanted to. And some of us roll physically and others on dnd beyond. DM just trusts us. So when I said a Nat 1 at one point with a pained sigh, I had forgotten about his odds/evens thing. He rolled and started laughing and then we all started laughing as the roll went through stupendously well.
Not exactly the same as what you’re describing but I thought it was fun and wanted to share <3
Do that many of you really play in these antagonistic as fuck groups? I see so many memes that imply a very a hostile dynamic between DM and players. I think you might need to find a better group if that’s the general atmosphere.
D&D is like sex, in the sense that “no D&D is better than bad D&D”
I find that the people who play in groups like this are people who haven’t been able to find a better group, but haven’t realised how antagonistic groups kill the joy of the game
I would agree with that. I’d rather not play than play in a bad group (or a group that doesn’t play the style I enjoy)
Not really, at least, not anymore.
There are some people that come to RPGs to escape reality and man, do they need it. D&D holds out a promise of agency, power, and control, in a fantasy setting free from real consequences. Provided a player lacks these things in real life, they can cling to it like a life-preserver. Then, take any of that away - as a DM must do - and things can get ugly.
I really want to say that there’s a known and practiced way to get people like this some real help, like a free hotline or website. After all, if it’s going to come up, this is the place it’s going to happen. Sadly, I know of no such resource.
Yeah, that makes sense. Those people would really hate my games because I’ve switched to call of cthulhu lately and in that game you are absolutely not powerful 😅
A fuckton of people these days play D&D as a pick-up game with randos off Discord or Roll20 and not actually in person with people they know.
with randos off Discord or Roll20 and not actually in person with people they know.
I know online rpg changed a lot in 20 years, but when I was playing online around 2010, playing on teamspeak, also meant be part of community, and ask others GM about new players before having them joining your table (No show, cheating and other bad behaviour would quickly be known by everyone) . Moreover, because you don’t know them, it’s easy to kick them out.
To be fair that still doesn’t prevent you from kicking arseholes out of the group. I run games for randoms on Discord and will absolutely tell people to either remember that we’re all here to have fun or to not bother coming back. That said I do recognise that it can be difficult to find groups sometimes and that can push people to have lower standards than they maybe should
I guess that makes sense. To be honest for me it’s such a social experience who I’m playing with is the biggest thing I care about.
so the jerk ratio is higher? genuine query, only played with friends irl
Much more so. Because the people that aren’t shitlords wind up finding and staying in a stable group, while the people who can’t maintain human relationships get perpetually booted back into the rando pool, so it becomes more and more concentrated awfulness all the time.
ew. ty for the deets
I have a feeling that people who spend their time posting memes about shitty relations between players and DMs probably aren’t actually playing that much.
Also, like, every social media platform seems to thrive on conflict, so there’s probably a relationship between spending loads of time engaging with those platforms and having a shitty attitude in general.
So many people hate secret rolls. So many people feel like they remove agency from them.
But that’s what the dice do. They’re agency-revoking machines.
Main issue is the extra GM workload, which is why I like the GM never roll trend, one less stuff to do means more time to focus on GMing
One reason people may dislike secret rolls is you can’t be sure the GM isn’t just lying to you. Though if that’s the case, you should probably find a GM you trust.
On the other hand, I prefer systems where dice aren’t the sole arbiter. I want to be able to spend a fate point or inspiration, or succeed at a cost.
That’s part of the job as a DM. I would often have new enemies show up to the fight if it was going too well, or secretly nerf the enemies stats if it was going too poorly.
That’s one way to play. Personally, if I knew the GM was secretly adjusting the game much I’d feel dissatisfied. Why not just give me a sticker that says “You win!” if I’m always going to win anyway?
Though this does tie into a separate bugbear of mine: D&D makes it hard to reason about encounters because the stats are unbound and all over the place. You see four bandits rummaging through the wagon they stole. Do each of them have 8 hp, 16 hp, 32 hp, 64 hp? Who knows! Do they attack once or twice? Could go either way! That is not an innate property of RPGs, but it’s very common in D&D, and I think leads to a lot of “oh this is going badly - let me fudge the stats”. Both because the GM got the math wrong, and because the players assumed these were 8 HP bandits and they’re actually “well you’re 5th level the bandits should be tougher” level scaling bandits.
For the bandit thing, a good DM would say that they look strong or that their equipment looks expensive, or something like that. A decent one would at least answer the player’s question on if they look tough. I agree though that D&D 5E, in particular, has a lot of issues though. It isn’t a great system. It’s just popular.
Personally, if I knew the GM was secretly adjusting the game much I’d feel dissatisfied
the point is to make your death a fun and meaningful one, or at least a good punchline to a run. it’s not ‘to let you win’ - I’ve had characters of my own survive encounters but regret the outcome - I think you’re reducing the dm/gm role to a combat calculator, and there’s so much more going on with a talented one. storytelling is my favorite part of DM’ing and I’ll be fucked if I let a kobold derail the overall plan… but there’s a lot of room for kobold fuckery within that envelope.
I don’t think the GM’s job is merely damage calculator. But this:
I’ll be fucked if I let a kobold derail the overall plan
I rather disagree with. If there’s a plan then why are we rolling dice? I don’t want to play to fulfill whatever the GM’s plan is. They should just write a book. I’ve had many great, memorable, scenes that came about because the players had a challenge and they overcame it. Sometimes after running away and trying again. If I just decided “oh I guess the dragon’s breath rolled really low” then, again, we should just write a story together. Or play a game that doesn’t have such a big random factor.
Like, I also don’t really enjoy a nameless kobold killing Finnigan the Fighter with a fluke natural 20 in what wasn’t supposed to be high stakes. But the solution for me isn’t to fudge rolls, but play a different game. I don’t really like stupid deaths like that, so I don’t play games that facilitate it. I know that’s kind of “baby with the bathwater” for some people, but I really do think some people are fighting against what D&D trends towards, when there are better tools. It’s a hammer. Sometimes you want a screwdriver or a pen.
Every TTRPG are just mechanics to tell a story.
D&D’ rules may be 80% about combat, but they are all still there to facilitate the story. You aren’t wargaming.
You roll dice to see how the story enfolds. Having it cut off abruptly because of a mistake calculation on the DM’s part while prepping the session goes against the story.
Also, having a player sit around twiddling their thumbs for the rest of the session because their character died is not fun and goes against the reason why we play games in the first place.
Fuck realism, it is a fantasy game we play to have fun. So getting rid of unfun aspects isn’t just recommended, it is a necessity.
I feel like your post and my post are tangential to each other.
Having it cut off abruptly because of a mistake calculation on the DM’s part while prepping the session goes against the story.
As I said, if you don’t want situations where a character meets an abrupt end anticlimactically, don’t play games that do that. That’s a pretty big property of DND and close relatives, but that’s not how ttrpgs have to be. Or, if you don’t want to throw out the baby with the bathwater, have some sort of table rule to handle it. I guess “hey GM can you fudge it if we’re going to die stupidly?” would be a rule you could adopt, even. Informed consent is important.
I think it’s because DND is so old. It’s like a black and white tv, and people have all these tips and solutions to solve problems like “I can’t tell if that’s red or purple”, and ignoring people saying “if that’s important to you, get a color tv”. Black and white is definitely a valid choice for media, but it probably shouldn’t be the default.
Also, having a player sit around twiddling their thumbs for the rest of the session because their character died is not fun and goes against the reason why we play games in the first place.
This is also kind of a dnd-ism that can be solved in various ways. Fate’s consequence system, for one example.
Fuck realism, it is a fantasy game we play to have fun. So getting rid of unfun aspects isn’t just recommended, it is a necessity.
I mean, I don’t particularly disagree with this but my point wasn’t really about “realism”. It’s about the social contract. I don’t want a game where the GM is telling a fixed story, and will move the pieces around to keep it on track.
Like, in one game the party was trying to deal with a wyvern that was making trouble in the region. The players had several misfortunes that I could have fudged, but it wouldn’t have been better
They wanted to use some spell or other to keep it from flying away. I rolled the save in the open. It saved, and flew away. Yeah, I could’ve just lied and said it failed, but why even have a saving throw system if you want that? Other games have meta game currency to force issues one way or another. Play that. Or port that into DND.
They tried to poison the wyvern. Rolled in the open to see if the wyvern ate the bait, or spotted the players hiding nearby. It rolled well, and took off before eating a full dose. Could’ve just fudged it, but they knew the odds.
So they followed it to its lair, dealt with the kobold cult (they made friends because this group was great), and had a climactic fight with the wyvern on top of the plateau, by the lake. Including a dramatic “wait if I dive into the water I take less fire damage, raw? I’m a warlock of the deep I’m diving in!” moment.
Or the time they challenged an NPC group to a battle of the bands to see who would claim ownership of the macguffin. The players lost. The NPCs took the macguffin back to the university. But they negotiated a compromise to borrow a similar, weaker, tool, and went on with that. The story was different, but it wasn’t worse. Fudging the rolls to be like “oh wow guys they really borked it up” would’ve felt cheesy as hell.
So yeah, I could’ve fudged it, but I didn’t have to. I’m not writing a book with a fixed plot.
TTRPGs are games where you create stories, and sometimes those stories are “we did something we shouldn’ta, and someone got ganked”. What you’re describing is someone reading you a story book.
Question. I’ve never DM’d obviously, but outside of combat I assumed the success threshold was something the DM made up on the spot based on how hard the task/situation should be and does not explicitly communicate that to the players. Is that what happens?
I would rather know my roll so I can imagine for myself how much of my character’s capability went into the attempt. Failing a check after rolling a 2 vs rolling a 19 affects how I play from then on, similar to how I think it would affect my character psychologically. If you try to climb a wall and fail without knowing the roll, would you try again? I hope that made sense.
It depends on the system and GM style.
I usually would tell players the target number. Their character would typically have a sense of how hard something is, more so than a desk job nerd sitting comfortably at home trying to imagine climbing a brick wall. If I say climbing the wall is difficult enough they have slim odds, they can then make an informed choice.
DND is also largely missing meta game currency, degree of success, and succeed at a cost. All of those change how the game works, and make hidden rolls less appealing.
For stuff like “there’s a hidden trap” or “they’re lying to you”, you don’t want players to enter into meta game “I know there’s something here so I’m going to be extra cautious” mode. I often find a hazard they can see and need to deal with is better than a hidden surprise. Like, all those black tiles shoot negative energy out when stepped on. And also a lot of Zombies just woke up and are shambling towards the tiles floor. Enjoy!
Personally I like how games like Fate you can mechanically reward players for going along with it. DND almost has that with Inspiration, but it’s very under baked.
DND is also especially loosey-goosey about target numbers aside from physical combat defenses and damage.
Another system might have a more explicit “To bully your way past someone, roll your provoke vs their will” combined with “the bouncer’s will score is 2”. DND has vague rules no one uses for “asking a favor”.
Sorry for a long unfocused answer. Happy to talk about whatever if you have questions
I don’t see the issue with the GM lying to players if the lie makes the game more fun and less frustrating.
That’s a valid mode of play, but I feel like if we’re going to have agreed upon rules we should follow them, and not unilaterally change them. If the rules say “you spot the trap on a roll of 10 or above”, the GM deciding you just don’t spot it because they say so can feel wrong. It can feel like cheating. We had an agreement, and they just broke it.
On the other hand, if in your session 0 you all agree that the GM may fudge things for more drama, then have at it.
On the third hand, I’ve done things like “the rules say X but I think that’s going to stink here. Anyone object to changing it?”.
The important thing is everyone gives informed consent.
Generally speaking, it’s almost always a bad idea to fudge things to make it worse, but acceptable to fudge things to make it better.
If your players are rolling well, good for them! Sometimes players want to feel really lucky and like their investments paid off. If that makes your campaign too easy there are lots of ways to address it, and an easy fight will rarely if ever cause a campaign to crumble
But a series of bad rolls? That can absolutely melt a campaign. It can suck the soul out of a party and make things feel unfair or too difficult even when it’s just a string of bad luck. Preventing a TPK or allowing a PC to narrowly escape certain doom can be the difference between a player losing interest and them learning how to mitigate risk.
GMs should all spend some time reading up on the psychology of games and player behavior. Stress and frustration exist in the strangest, most illogical places because our brains are strange and illogical.
One of the things I like from Fate is the concept of Conceding. It gives players the option to give up.
So when you have bad rolls or the situation is going real bad, you can concede. You all decide what that looks like. You don’t get whatever you wanted in the conflict, but you decide if that means you’re just left for dead, or you fall into the river and are swept away, or what. You get one or more fate points, too. Because this is written into the rules, it doesn’t feel as cheaty as it would in DND for a player to say “I don’t think we can win this. Can we say we escape somehow?”
You can always choose to fight to the bitter end, but then you don’t really have anyone to blame but yourself.
DND is an old game and it’s just missing whole concepts like this that I think would make a better experience.
6e when?
I don’t think D&D will ever really change much. There are people that really like its quirks, and there’d be a backlash from people if they made large changes. People still repeat largely nonsense complaints about 4e, sometimes while trying to patch 5e with ideas that 4e did.
Unfortunately, some people like it without ever trying anything else. D&D is a mega behemoth. I personally think it’s more popular than it should be, given how many people I’ve talked to that play it only with a generous heaping of house rules and practices that transform it into something else.
Sure, sometimes. It should be used incredibly rarely. However, not in this way. The GM has plenty of levers to pull without messing with the one thing you have players for. If the GM is just going to tell a story then they should write a book. If they want to do cooperative storytelling then they need to cooperate.
If the rolls don’t matter then the story gets incredibly boring, as it just goes whatever direction the GM wants. Without failure, success is boring. Without success, failure sucks. When they’re perfectly balanced by the GM, it’s predictable and not surprising or fun.
I would say you as a player experience the game best when you are not privy to 90% of what happens behind the DM screen. The more mystery there is, the better. Half the point of the screen is for the DM to be able to weigh if certain things trigger and if they do not, imo. I agree that D&D is at its best when a DM loosely has what an idea for the campaign but leave it up to the players to write the story.
I personally had the most fun as a player when the DM was constantly rolling hidden checks, since out of character you feel that danger is lurking. I agree that you wouldn’t want predictable outcomes for whatever happens next, since the fun is in the mystery.
I would say that the DM has a lot of agency to pick and choose what moments you succeed versus fail. The DM may throw a check at you that requires a 30+ to succeed, but you don’t know that in the moment. Likewise, if you’re in a close fight and one of the players scores a natural 20 and a big hit, then I feel it’s a better moment for the story if that enemy drops from that. Rather than having the foe still stand with a couple hp, it dodges the next two rounds of hits, and wipes the party.
I agree totally, but the rolls that aren’t supposed to be behind the screen shouldn’t be. It removes agency from the players when the DM is deciding what they can and can’t do. Like you said, there are plenty of things they do control. There’s no reason to control other things. There should be hidden checks for things like spotting traps/enemies they aren’t aware of, and things like that. Their actions shouldn’t be hidden though.
Shouldn’t play a game with random rolls if one doesn’t like random rolls. Secret rolls don’t add anything except suspicion.
As a DM if I decide something is going to happen then I don’t bother rolling. Like if a character who is competent wants to do something and they have plenty of time they just succeed. If a monster is sneaking I might just compare their stealth to character perception if being stealthy doesn’t have more of an impact that the characters finding out they were being followed. If it has a game play impact then I roll openly but don’t say what it is for. That way there is no suspicion that I rolled low and decided that it should just pass instead when the reason for the roll is eventually revealed.
Some events in my campaign are doomed to happen no matter what, but I don’t always want the players to know it.
For example if they try a Survival check to track someone who was never even there, I might make a secret Stealth roll plus a million bazillion.
For all its other faults, I love the Edge system of shadowrun. In brief, Edge is an attribute like strength or charisma but also a resource pool. You can spend a point for a greater chance of success, or you can permanently burn an edge point for a +4 success (degree of success is calculated into damage).
I feel like I would never burn edge, but hold onto it like Elixirs in final fantasy. (Unless you can restore it somehow)
You can, it just seemed like a lot of info to dump in my first post. Shadowrun is a classless, level less system. Your xp is called Karma, and you can spend Karma to increase your skills and attributes.
There are probably ways to ensure that the DM isn’t lying to you, like the DM could take pictures of the dice rolls and reveal the pictures later. But trust is better like you said.
One reason people may dislike secret rolls is you can’t be sure the GM isn’t just lying to you.
But how do they know what the DC is?
Depends on the system, style, and context.
For example, if I’m casting a spell on a victim in 5e, I know what the DC is.
For something like “finding the trap”, in D&D that’s pretty open to the GM. I usually tell players the target number before they roll, so they can better decide if they want to use more resources or rethink.
Other systems might have more specific rules.
I’m a GM and I have offered my players many times to stop doing secret rolls, but they like it. I think they especially like it when I have to make up BS on a crit fail
TBH, 5e hates secret roles. (yes, i know this is not a 5e specific post, just a personal gripe)
There are way too many abilities that trigger on a failed roll or can be used after a roll that this kind of play style straight up conflicts with.
One of the worst ones for this kind of thing is the soulknife rogue’s Psi-bolstered knack (that they get at level 3), with both triggers explicitly on a failed roll and refunds if the extra dice if it doesnt make it succeed so you cant even include mystery if the reroll made it a success.
with both triggers explicitly on a failed roll and refunds if the extra dice if it doesnt make it succeed so you cant even include mystery if the reroll made it a success.
It works fine as long as they don’t try to use the extra die until after the actual result is clear. So it’s fine if they’re trying to reroll checking for traps, but not if they’re trying to reroll whether or not some creature successfully laid eggs inside them.
TTRPGs with no potential for unexpected failures are improv storytelling. Also a valid hobby, just, like… a different one
While this is true, there are also aspects of game play that blind rolls would interfere with, such as Heroic Inspiration or the Lucky feat, where you should be able to see what was rolled in order to use them as designed.
Are blind rolls implemented across the board like that very often? There’s plenty of rolls that don’t affect the game if the players know about them, or would hinder the game like you’re saying. Probably for the sake of brevity the OG OP just didn’t clarify all the exceptions to the rule. IDK tho maybe there really are pure-secret-roll DMs
You’d generally want blind rolls whenever a player is trying to find something out, like check for traps or see if someone’s lying.
Well, not every game has Heroic Inspiration, but it still has people that gripe about secret rolls. And of those games that have metacurrencies for rerolls and the like, they’re not intended to be used in those situations.
Not every game has Wisdom saves either, I’m just going off what’s in the meme. If you have an ability that can influence the outcome of your rolls, you should be able to see your rolls to use your ability as designed, assuming it’s a roll that you should normally be privy to the result of and not the DM changing things as shown in the meme.
If a player is abusing knowledge of their rolls somehow, the solution isn’t to fuck with game mechanics for everyone at the table, it’s to talk with that person until you can either get on the same page, or not play together.
Unless you have something specific, and you should let your DM know ahead of time, for wisdom rolls specifically blind rolls can be pretty fun.
That said, if you roll a nat1 and you DM says someone is trustworthy then that also doesn’t mean they’re lying, so it’s not a huge deal.
tangentially related:
mothership has a cool mechanic where when you roll a death save, you do so under a cup so no-one can see it, then lift the cup when a party member goes over and checks to see if you’re alive
i liked it so much that i’ve cribbed it for other systemsNow that is creative.
I have to roll in the open, otherwise I’m tempted to lie about the rolls to benefit the players. I don’t want to, it just happens.
start of the big antagonist fight and it rolls a crit that would end the party and the session right then and there in an unsatisfying way? no it didn’t lol
PF2e. #recommend
ok so for anyone wandering, most rolls in pf2e are required to be open, except for actions with the secret trait, which the gm rolls in secret. there are very fw of those, and they are only ever used for when a player/pc shouldn’t know how well they went. some examples are: peception checks, stealth, recall knowledge, deception, and some other similar checks that, in real life, you couldn’t really know how well you did
though these secret rolls remove the comedy behind the kronk stealth theme music (emporer’s new groove) upon critical failure, it does help with metagaming.
with a critical failure, the gm could describe one of the pcs doing something really dumb. like with stealth, other pcs could tell the one with a low roll to stop being loud or something and they could get a free reroll
Gamang
☕
