Forum

[ggroy]

Originally Posted by Halivar

Seems like it. But, in the end, it's the player perception that matters. If the players feel the game has been fair, and they had fun playing, mission accomplished.

NOW, I have played in games like this, except the DM relied on dice rolls because he couldn't be bothered to prepare for his games (e.g. his DM screen had nothing behind it). THAT was endlessly frustrating. If he had so much as a printout of stereo instructions back there, and actually looked down at them from time to time, I probably would not have been the wiser.

The trick is maintaining a facade, so that the players don't catch on so easily to the DM playing with a different set of rules. At minimum, I would keep a lot of dice around and one of the core books turned to a semi-random page, behind the DM screen. (I would change the semi-random page or even the book, every so often).

In terms of dice rolling, I would always roll enough dice so that it "sounded" like I was rolling damage whenever a badguy was attacking a player character, even if the badguy's attack was a miss. Conversely, I would sometimes roll a d20 "defense roll" when a badguy was attacked, even if I was never going to be using the "defense roll" during my "experiment". I also would try to maintain a "poker face" whenever I rolled a natural 20 crit for a badguy attacking a player, and just tell them the high damage roll without any "excitement". The only hint that I rolled a crit was in my description of what the badguy did to the player.