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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mark" data-source="post: 5041480" data-attributes="member: 5">It is absolutely essentially, particularly if you and/or your players have been playing in non-sandbox formats, to spell it out, out-of-game, to the players in advance how your sandbox (note that I do not say "a" sandbox) will function.  Everyone will assume different levels of shorthand and have varying concepts going in, so take a lesson from these threads of yours and know that everyone will bring their own meta-nomenclature and personalized vernacular to the table.  You have to be sure that they understand and accept your understanding of it all or, at least, understand how to mentally convert your own to their own.That said, I prefer to keep many die rolls secret and feel that this is particularly important to my sense of sandboxing.  If a die roll is meant to resolve a binary circumstance and the players are meant to know the result immediately, then they roll openly.  If a die roll is meant to dictate the degrees of a result and the characters are meant to weigh the outcome against facts in evidence without knowing the definite truth, the die roll remains secret and I, as DM, describe the result.  So, as to skill checks, they happen all of the time and the players rarely know just how often.  I am not one to simply allow players to outright call for a skill check but no matter what they are doing, I am often rolling skill checks or their equivalent with or without the knowledge of the players.  It's good to keep a list of all pertinent PC knowledge and ability check mods handy on the DM side of the screen for quick reference.</blockquote>

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