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 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.

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.

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.

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

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”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I like making the math rocks go clicky clack though

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.

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.

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

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.