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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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?

6e when?

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

so the jerk ratio is higher? genuine query, only played with friends irl

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.

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.