It depends on the system and GM style. I usually would tell players the target number. Their character would typically have a sense of how hard something is, more so than a desk job nerd sitting comfortably at home trying to imagine climbing a brick wall. If I say climbing the wall is difficult enough they have slim odds, they can then make an informed choice. DND is also largely missing meta game currency, degree of success, and succeed at a cost. All of those change how the game works, and make hidden rolls less appealing. For stuff like "there's a hidden trap" or "they're lying to you", you don't want players to enter into meta game "I know there's something here so I'm going to be extra cautious" mode. I often find a hazard they can see and need to deal with is better than a hidden surprise. Like, all those black tiles shoot negative energy out when stepped on. And also a lot of Zombies just woke up and are shambling towards the tiles floor. Enjoy! Personally I like how games like Fate you can mechanically reward players for going along with it. DND almost has that with Inspiration, but it's very under baked. DND is also especially loosey-goosey about target numbers aside from physical combat defenses and damage. Another system might have a more explicit "To bully your way past someone, roll your provoke vs their will" combined with "the bouncer's will score is 2". DND has vague rules no one uses for "asking a favor". Sorry for a long unfocused answer. Happy to talk about whatever if you have questions

Generally speaking, it's almost always a bad idea to fudge things to make it worse, but acceptable to fudge things to make it better. If your players are rolling well, good for them! Sometimes players want to feel really lucky and like their investments paid off. If that makes your campaign too easy there are lots of ways to address it, and an easy fight will rarely if ever cause a campaign to crumble But a series of bad rolls? That can absolutely melt a campaign. It can suck the soul out of a party and make things feel unfair or too difficult even when it's just a string of bad luck. Preventing a TPK or allowing a PC to narrowly escape certain doom can be the difference between a player losing interest and them learning how to mitigate risk. GMs should all spend some time reading up on the psychology of games and player behavior. Stress and frustration exist in the strangest, most illogical places because our brains are strange and illogical.

start of the big antagonist fight and it rolls a crit that would end the party and the session right then and there in an unsatisfying way? no it didn't lol

Do that many of you really play in these antagonistic as fuck groups? I see so many memes that imply a very a hostile dynamic between DM and players. I think you might need to find a better group if that's the general atmosphere.

Unless you have something specific, and you should let your DM know ahead of time, for wisdom rolls specifically blind rolls can be pretty fun. That said, if you roll a nat1 and you DM says someone is trustworthy then that also doesn’t mean they’re lying, so it’s not a _huge_ deal.

A fuckton of people these days play D&D as a pick-up game with randos off Discord and not actually in person with people they know.

For all its other faults, I love the Edge system of shadowrun. In brief, Edge is an attribute like strength or charisma but also a resource pool. You can spend a point for a greater chance of success, or you can permanently burn an edge point for a +4 success (degree of success is calculated into damage).

> with both triggers explicitly on a failed roll and refunds if the extra dice if it doesnt make it succeed so you cant even include mystery if the reroll made it a success. It works fine as long as they don't try to use the extra die until after the actual result is clear. So it's fine if they're trying to reroll checking for traps, but not if they're trying to reroll whether or not some creature successfully laid eggs inside them.

You'd generally want blind rolls whenever a player is trying to find something out, like check for traps or see if someone's lying.

I guess that makes sense. To be honest for me it's such a social experience who I'm playing with is the biggest thing I care about.

I feel like I would never burn edge, but hold onto it like Elixirs in final fantasy. (Unless you can restore it somehow)

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?