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.

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.

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.

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.

The confusion here is there are a few different ways of playing D&D and many different types of DMs out there. The number one rule that matters, imo, is that everyone is having fun and enjoying the game at your table.

Some players don’t want their characters to die, at least non-meaningfully, in a campaign that’s meant to be long-running. D&D is as much about the story as it is about having fun and setting expectations with your players.

If you market the campaign as mostly storytelling and light combat, but then the party rolls up geared for the former but not the later - then people will likely leave feeling frustrated instead of feeling like they had fun when they die to a random encounter. If you don’t set expectations well or prepare people well, then some people will quit playing right there instead of creating a new character.

If I want a high-stakes, combat-geared campaign where people will be expected to create new characters at some point then I feel it’s important to lay that out from session zero.

If I want some middle of road campaign geared towards storytelling and medium combat, even then I’d be letting players know from the start that their characters can die from any encounter if they push their luck too much.

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.

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.

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.

I like making the math rocks go clicky clack though

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.

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…’

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.

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…’

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.

The confusion here is there are a few different ways of playing D&D and many different types of DMs out there.

This is an important point. There’s not really a “right” way to play so much as a “right way for your group”.

I don’t think D&D specifically does a good job of guiding groups into finding what they’ll enjoy. It comes loaded with a lot of assumptions, and then different players can sit down at a table without realizing how different their axioms are.