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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Sword of Spirit" data-source="post: 7412094" data-attributes="member: 6677017">My motivation for this exploration is consistency and fairness in my game. We have a shared DM situation where I'm the "over-DM" who will make the final decisions, since the campaign and world are my creations. Before I do so, I need to make sure I understand all the implications of my decisions so I can accomplish the goal. Because of our situation, everyone has a PC at all times (or if you prefer, a DMPC when they happen to be the one DMing), so it isn't as simple as just ruling in favor of the PCs (especially since this is also relevant for the monsters) or for DMing expediency. Hence, getting down to the nitty-gritty details of this situation.Let's set aside shield for a moment, and I'm going to entertain an alternate interpretation relating to Cutting Words and Combat Inspiration, namely that there isn't a "baseline assumption" for dice rolling in the game as a whole, and that the intention is for shield and Defensive Duelist to be left up to the individual group. If that is the case however, we have an anomaly, since Cutting Words and Combat Inspiration explicitly do make an assumption about dice, that being that the player can see the d20 before the DM "determines whether the attack roll or ability check succeeds or fails" or "before knowing whether it hits or misses". Assuming this wasn't just a design botch, what are they trying to tell us about how these features are intended to work?We can actually interpret the text in a variety of ways if we want to get creative, based on the presence or absence of words such as "can" and "must" and so forth. But in my estimation the most likely intent seems to be that you must choose to use this feature before you know the total attack/check result but you can wait until you see the raw d20 roll to make that decision.This is also exactly the framework I'm working under. Maybe I should have made that more explicit from the beginning.This is why I think the designers intended Cutting Words and Combat Inspiration to work the way that I just mentioned. You are supposed to have some information to help you make the decision, but you aren't supposed to know for certain what the results are going to be. But, taking this angle where I'm not assuming they are basing the whole game around seeing the dice, and therefore aren't making that assumption with shield we have a dilemma. How do we handle Cutting Words and Combat Inspiration to best approximate intent, in a game where the dice are not normally rolled in the open?One could say that the DM is under obligation to declare the dice roll to the players before announcing success or failure of the attack or check, in situations where one of them has Cutting Words or Combat Inspiration and the feature might apply. That seems to put a heavy burden on the DM, and kind of negates the point of this "there is no baseline" angle, because it requires the DM to break up his normal style and use this particular one just for these two abilities. And since these abilities are generally relevant on a regular basis, it would be more of a hassle for the DM to just use these features when they might apply (ie, most of the time) than to simply change his style--so we're back to the rules for those two abilities setting the baseline assumption of how the game is supposed to be played.What other options do we have that both preserve the option to hide rolls and/or declare the action total, yet provide the same level of player choice and knowledge?If the DM declares the final result, then the player has more information than intended. If the DM simply says, "hit" without declaring the total or the d20 result then the player has different information than intended, but not necessarily more. To preserve a similar amount of information during the decision point, the DM could just say "hit" and then allow the player to make the decision at that point. For DMs who generally just say "hit" or "miss" this is a possible alternate solution that can preserve some sort of alternate yet similar point of player choice and knowledge, but it does ignore the actual rule given for the features.If the DM typically declares the final result, "Does a 17 hit you?" these features require him to either make an exception and only declare the d20 result, or make an exception and only declare "hit" and allow the player to respond as just described. In either case, they place the extra burden on the DM when these two features apply, and due to the prevalence of these situations, require him to change his dice rolling style.So, other options?</blockquote>

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