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.

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…’

The math has been within you the whole time, my boy. The rocks do nothing.

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.

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.

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.

And if your DM is just looking at the die and saying, ‘yah’ or ‘nah,’ they shouldn’t be your DM

Where do you think DMs come from?

I would say it shouldn’t be something you do often. Maybe if you’re secretly charmed or mind controlled I could see it, but I don’t think there would be too many instances a DM should be hiding a player’s roll.

For sure the DM shouldn’t abuse the player’s trust in those situations either. If it’s a hidden roll, the DM shouldn’t be lying about if the player actually passed the check or not.

I can see the appeal, for instance, of having the party running for their lives to escape a collapsing cave and having players make hidden rolls as they perform strength and dexterity checks on the way out. There can be tension behind not knowing if you pass or fail. Killing a player that way would kinda suck though rather than having some sort of funny outcome if they fail, imo.

DMs are encouraged to be the guides for players, some players may not even know what type of player they will be until they sit down and play.

I agree there can be quite a range of differences for how people play. A balanced campaign can at least keep both role players and dungeon junkies happy, I feel.

Same place as everyone else. They’re just a peculiar bunch of people who get more enjoyment out of supporting the players than being the heroes of the story. Not having one of those people means you are not equipped to play the game, just as much as if you didn’t have dice. You can try to put someone else in that slot, in the same way you can try to play Eberron as a setting using Werewolf: The Apocalypse rules, but your expectations will need to be low.

What are they rolling unquestioned? Genuine question. I’ve had players roll unasked because they wanted to see if their character would do X or Y but that’s not mechanical. That’s them letting dice handle something they can’t puzzle through in real time.

As for feats, rerolls, and their analogs in other systems, those are things for the character to decide to use. Most of those rolls, in most systems, are ‘may’ actions, which means the decision lies with the character. You wouldn’t decide things for them, even if it seems obviously ‘better’ in your head for them to do it. You just let them avoid thinking about the numbers. You can even use software so you don’t have to do the math. The point is just to move away from the distraction of the numbers.

Immediate flaw there; there is no immersion for the DM. You aren’t breaking their immersion because it can’t exist.

You could argue for breaking their flow, but that’s only an issue where they aren’t used to it. Once everyone is used to the flow of things, you shorten the workflow from ‘player:intent>player:declaration>DM:mechanical interpretation> DM:request>player:roll>player:report>DM:mechanical interpretation>DM:report>repeat’ to ‘player:intent>player:declaration>DM:mechanical interpretation>DM:report>repeat’

One of the problems that people have understanding RPG dynamics is the GM/DM is not playing the same game as everyone else. They aren’t an entertainer, like a Martin Clunes, they are an entertainer like a Martin Scorsese, or like a one-person, brain-powered Superblue. Their real role is in ‘making the magic happen.’ The players are ‘playing DnD’ or ‘playing Changeling’ or whatever. The GM, in any GM focused system, is playing The GM’s Game. It’s the same game, no matter which of the GM focused systems they are using to play The GM’s Game. Sometimes, the group of players is of a certain type, and the numbers don’t distract them. Such a group doesn’t need the GM to handle the numbers, but many players do find them distracting, and if the GM can handle it, it can make the game better, which means the GM is winning their game.

Several things:

First: Of course there is GM immersion. The GM has to be able to “see” the world in his mind so he can describe it adequately to the players. Immersion is more than just “feeling like you’re there”. Nobody at the table thinks they are an actual high wizard or barbarian or sth. You can tell by how they are saying “I swing my axe” instead of actually swinging an axe. Immersion just means how coherent and complete their mental picture of the world and their characters place in it is (which comes with an empathetic connection with the character). The GM is doing the same thing to a lesser degree for many characters (all NPCs at the least, but also the PCs).

Second: Your workflow diagram is only describing the simplest case of “Straight roll with predefined modifiers” and omits the kind of important part of actually rolling the dice and doing math with them.

Third: You entirely neglect the fact rolling a die is often actually fun. Blowing on it. Pleading with the dice gods to give you a good result. Yelling “NAT 20!” or whispering “NAT 1” in dismay (or whatever your systems equivalent is). Putting a badly performing die in prison. Borrowing the lucky die from another player and negotiating lending fees. Rolling 15d6 to see how much damage your nuclear leveled fire ball actually does.

Ultimately, you should play how you and your table enjoy it. I wouldn’t want to play at a table where some players (the GM is a player too) don’t get to make any rolls or have to make all the rolls. You do you, but to me that sounds like a terrible time.

PS: During the pandemic my table switched to a VTT and I enabled automatic saving throws. I had to disable that feature because my players HATED “the computer” rolling for them. They insisted that they must be the ones to click on the “roll saving throw” button. If I tried to take their rolling during live gaming I would loose the table.

Re the first: This is a semantic dance. Immersion is not rigidly defined. I define it as the sense of losing oneself in the diegetic space, usually by identifying with a particular element within it. I took it as self-evident that no one is achieving total immersion, but yes, you are correct there, no one is achieving full immersion. But the GM cannot have even high immersion. They are an individual. The NPCs are many. The GM is the embodiment of the laws of physics, nature, cause and effect, etc. That is not a human, or even sapient, identity with which they could identify.

Re the second: That’s a simplified workflow that applies to basically any GM-based system. Nothing that could be reasonably added would change the fact that the chain is shorter with fewer steps. That’s how real number subtraction works.

n-x<n where x>0

Re the rest of it: I’m sorry. I assumed you would understand that my saying ‘don’t discount this possibility’ is not the same as ‘absolutely everyone must do this my perfect and correct way.’ I assumed you would take it as patently obvious all methods one might approach any game with must involve participant consent, but, okay, let’s start with the full text of Principia Mathematica so we can establish 1+1=2 and then move on to establish a shared moral framework of consent and all the other things that I would consider obvious but you feel the need to spell out explicitly, and then finally we can have a nice, clearly defined discussion about dice.

Short version: No, not every game has target numbers.

Long version: within the d&d context, DCs set by the DM have only existed for about half of d&d’s history, starting with 3e. Before that, “skill checks” worked in a few different ways including percentile dice compared to level, rolling under the most relevant ability score, or just rolling a d6. Outside the d&d context, my gut says that arbitrary target numbers are less common than fixed ones or ranges. In my experience, they’re faster and simpler, too.