Cope
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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.
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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…’
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?
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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.
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.
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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.
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.
