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Message: <blockquote data-quote="D+1" data-source="post: 2219501" data-attributes="member: 13654">That is indeed the rub.  It can be both good and bad.  How much of which depends on what you want from the game and what the players are willing to accept.When you roll in the open there can be no question that the roll itself is fair.  But are the bonuses you add or penalties you apply to it equally fair at all times?  You don't place those out in the open for public scrutiny by players do you?  When you decide whom the monsters will attack and WHY - is it fair and always impartial?  When you roll in the open there is quickly no question of just what the total bonues/penalties ARE, which prevents maintaining the mystery of just how tough/weak an opponent is.  When you roll in the open you can't "cheat" against the players - but then neither can you "cheat" in their FAVOR.  That removes a highly useful tool of mitigating encounters that you may have under-estimated.  (TPK's are not always the fault of the players or the randomness of the dice - sometimes it's the DM's fault.)See, I'm personally of the opinion that if I have to choose between the almost certain death of character A or character B, I DON'T have to be fair and impartial.  I CAN choose character A simply because I know the player won't be back again next week or because character B's death will have a much more problematic impact on the flow of the campaign.  My impartiality and fairness comes out of not SEEKING to kill any given PC without bloody good reason for doing so.  (Of course, I prefer to avoid overreliance upon any one character this way).  As DM I am the arbiter within the game, but I am NOT utterly impartial.  In fact, it is my firm belief that...A) there ISN'T a DM anywhere who is truly impartial.  We all have biases - and not all biases are BAD THINGS.B) anyone who claims to be unbiased is lying to cover up, or hasn't really come to grips with the notion in the first place.C) IME at least, "impartiality" and rolling in the open is very often (though not always...) just an easy cop-out for not making any difficult decisions: decisions that naturally carry the mere POSSIBILITY of being disliked by someone, but nonetheless ultimately will make for the best, most enjoyable experience for everyone at the table.  The dice don't run the game - the DM does.D) if the DM cannot be trusted to be impartial there's deeper problems that need to be addressed.E) impartiality in rolling openly is really an illusion, a diversionary tactic. Just because you roll the die openly doesn't mean you can't cheat the modifiers, choose whom to attack, choose which attack forms will be used, choose WHEN to attack at all, choose what monsters appear and how many, etc.  The DM has at all times and in all ways the ability to kill the PC's.After everything is said and done, if you WANT to roll in the open and the players are okay with that then the rest is irrelevant.  Rolling openly isn't inherently BAD.  But I still think it's a net loss rather than a net benefit to anyone.  Rolling openly should be reserved for those times when the DM is actively, deliberately and openly dissasociating himself from the results.  E.g., I do it when a player has persisted in doing something really stupid despite multiple warnings, or perhaps instead is doing something inane and pointless.  I then roll openly to emphasize the inevetability of the results - to graphically demonstrate just precisely how many dice of damage are being rolled, or that regardless of how low or high the to-hit roll that an attack WILL hit/miss, etc.YMMV</blockquote>

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