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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 6730927" data-attributes="member: 18">It's an interesting question, because I've played all-out both ways.For my first 15-odd years as DM, I carefully selected which rolls the players could see. I rolled their checks to find traps and so on for them, I rolled all the monster rolls behind a screen (which seemed almost necessary in 2E/3E, unless you loved TPKs!), etc. etc. Then with 4E I decided to try the opposite, because random TPKs almost never happen in 4E. All rolls were in the open, mine, theirs, nothing hidden.Both produced very different results. Looking just at player rolls, having some hidden induced more paranoia, and made immersion a fair bit easier, because you didn't know how well you'd done. However, it also lead to a lot of time-wasting with "Okay, I check again but this time..."-type stuff (where possible), sometimes excessive paranoia (i.e. past the point of being fun/funny), and a lot of "But did you include X?!", particularly in 3.XE.Having them all in the open produced a lot of hilarity i.e. *Rolls 3* "Oh I definitely did a great job there!", and a fair bit of "Well, okay, I guess I also check for X" (though there was a lot of that with hidden rolls too, because paranoia). Immersion was lessened a bit, but overall the game ran faster, and was significantly less paranoid. Players were surprisingly accepting of bad rolls, I found, without excessive metagaming (this really surprised me) - people actually did less "Okay I try again and do this..." than with hidden rolls. There was also some fun and genuinely good RP around the bad rolls, which I hadn't seen coming.I think both have their ups and downs. Overall I'd say hiding some rolls makes sense for a high-immersion, high-tension games, particularly of a more paranoid "death lurks..." kind, and particularly trap-heavy ones. My experience is that it does slow the game down a bit though.Whereas for a more fast/fluid game, perhaps a little less immersive, a bit more either focused on either tactics or person-to-person RP (rather than trapfinding or the like), then I'd go with open rolls, esp. if you know you can trust the players not to be dweebs about them (which I can, fortunately).Regarding entitled to, I think the default RAI position has to be that a player sees all their own rolls (unless I've missed something in 5E, which I may have). Then, if you're wanting to hide some, you make sure to address the expectation of seeing their rolls when the game starts (or they join the group or whatever). I think it's important, too, as a DM to consider what really needs to be hidden, because I've seen DMs who tried to hide virtually everything, and it was bloody tedious, with us basically sitting there waiting for him to do a bunch of rolls - not tense, just tedious, because there were so many.(As an aside, I don't think there's ever a compelling reason to hide attack rolls - I've tried it but it did nothing but slow the game down - it really doesn't matter if the PCs work out that roll X hits and roll Y misses, and thus the AC or NAD of the enemy, because they still need to roll the same numbers!)</blockquote>

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