This is the heart of tons of table drama. The DM wants to tell a story and the players want to be heroic. The dice add randomness that can add drama, but they also cause chaos by introduction outcomes people don’t want.
If you’re just trusting the DM, why have rolls at all? Just tell GM what you’re doing and GM tells you what happens. But then players feel like they’ve got less heroic agency. They’re not pulling together a brunch of cool traits to do something risky and daring. They’re saying “I leap over the battlement and drive my spear into the champion’s throat” and the DM either says “Yeah” or “Nah”. You need phenomenal trust in your GM for that to work. A bunch of 12 year olds at a table aren’t going to have that.
Let them handle the mechanical elements of the game so the players can focus on the role play.
The mechanics are, ostensibly, there to facilitate the roleplay. The paladin’s smite isn’t just a set of numbers, it’s an expression of their role as holy warrior and divine judge.
That’s why you would keep the randomness of the dice, but isolate it. It’s easy to trust a DM to be reasonable when it comes to some things, but the randomness is useful in making the play more interesting, and people aren’t great at creating statistically distributed randomness. And if your DM is just looking at the die and saying, ‘yah’ or ‘nah,’ they shouldn’t be your DM. If your players can’t handle being told their characters’ attack didn’t land, they aren’t ready to play the game. It isn’t possible to win or lose DnD, but it’s absolutely possible to succeed or fail to play.
And you wouldn’t be removing the mechanical elements, such as the smite, just putting player focus on the diegetic space. They can still smite, but with their attention spent on thinking about the righteous smash of their weapon against the enemy’s armour and less on going ‘okay, then we carry the one, and…’
Same place as everyone else. They’re just a peculiar bunch of people who get more enjoyment out of supporting the players than being the heroes of the story. Not having one of those people means you are not equipped to play the game, just as much as if you didn’t have dice. You can try to put someone else in that slot, in the same way you can try to play Eberron as a setting using Werewolf: The Apocalypse rules, but your expectations will need to be low.
This sounds like a “GM is the entertainer” thing to me.
Either you think doing rolls is a mechanical burden that strips away immersion and reduces fun. In this case making the GM do all the rolls does the same to them and why would that be ok?
Or you don’t think rolling all the dice is a burden for the GM. Well then it wouldn’t be a burden for the players to do it either.
There are systems that are all player facing (players make all the rolls), but I’ve never heard of the system that expects the GM to make all the rolls.
Immediate flaw there; there is no immersion for the DM. You aren’t breaking their immersion because it can’t exist.
You could argue for breaking their flow, but that’s only an issue where they aren’t used to it. Once everyone is used to the flow of things, you shorten the workflow from ‘player:intent>player:declaration>DM:mechanical interpretation> DM:request>player:roll>player:report>DM:mechanical interpretation>DM:report>repeat’ to ‘player:intent>player:declaration>DM:mechanical interpretation>DM:report>repeat’
One of the problems that people have understanding RPG dynamics is the GM/DM is not playing the same game as everyone else. They aren’t an entertainer, like a Martin Clunes, they are an entertainer like a Martin Scorsese, or like a one-person, brain-powered Superblue. Their real role is in ‘making the magic happen.’ The players are ‘playing DnD’ or ‘playing Changeling’ or whatever. The GM, in any GM focused system, is playing The GM’s Game. It’s the same game, no matter which of the GM focused systems they are using to play The GM’s Game. Sometimes, the group of players is of a certain type, and the numbers don’t distract them. Such a group doesn’t need the GM to handle the numbers, but many players do find them distracting, and if the GM can handle it, it can make the game better, which means the GM is winning their game.
First: Of course there is GM immersion. The GM has to be able to “see” the world in his mind so he can describe it adequately to the players. Immersion is more than just “feeling like you’re there”. Nobody at the table thinks they are an actual high wizard or barbarian or sth. You can tell by how they are saying “I swing my axe” instead of actually swinging an axe. Immersion just means how coherent and complete their mental picture of the world and their characters place in it is (which comes with an empathetic connection with the character). The GM is doing the same thing to a lesser degree for many characters (all NPCs at the least, but also the PCs).
Second: Your workflow diagram is only describing the simplest case of “Straight roll with predefined modifiers” and omits the kind of important part of actually rolling the dice and doing math with them.
Third: You entirely neglect the fact rolling a die is often actually fun. Blowing on it. Pleading with the dice gods to give you a good result. Yelling “NAT 20!” or whispering “NAT 1” in dismay (or whatever your systems equivalent is). Putting a badly performing die in prison. Borrowing the lucky die from another player and negotiating lending fees. Rolling 15d6 to see how much damage your nuclear leveled fire ball actually does.
Ultimately, you should play how you and your table enjoy it. I wouldn’t want to play at a table where some players (the GM is a player too) don’t get to make any rolls or have to make all the rolls. You do you, but to me that sounds like a terrible time.
PS: During the pandemic my table switched to a VTT and I enabled automatic saving throws. I had to disable that feature because my players HATED “the computer” rolling for them. They insisted that they must be the ones to click on the “roll saving throw” button. If I tried to take their rolling during live gaming I would loose the table.
This is the heart of tons of table drama. The DM wants to tell a story and the players want to be heroic. The dice add randomness that can add drama, but they also cause chaos by introduction outcomes people don’t want.
If you’re just trusting the DM, why have rolls at all? Just tell GM what you’re doing and GM tells you what happens. But then players feel like they’ve got less heroic agency. They’re not pulling together a brunch of cool traits to do something risky and daring. They’re saying “I leap over the battlement and drive my spear into the champion’s throat” and the DM either says “Yeah” or “Nah”. You need phenomenal trust in your GM for that to work. A bunch of 12 year olds at a table aren’t going to have that.
The mechanics are, ostensibly, there to facilitate the roleplay. The paladin’s smite isn’t just a set of numbers, it’s an expression of their role as holy warrior and divine judge.
That’s why you would keep the randomness of the dice, but isolate it. It’s easy to trust a DM to be reasonable when it comes to some things, but the randomness is useful in making the play more interesting, and people aren’t great at creating statistically distributed randomness. And if your DM is just looking at the die and saying, ‘yah’ or ‘nah,’ they shouldn’t be your DM. If your players can’t handle being told their characters’ attack didn’t land, they aren’t ready to play the game. It isn’t possible to win or lose DnD, but it’s absolutely possible to succeed or fail to play.
And you wouldn’t be removing the mechanical elements, such as the smite, just putting player focus on the diegetic space. They can still smite, but with their attention spent on thinking about the righteous smash of their weapon against the enemy’s armour and less on going ‘okay, then we carry the one, and…’
Where do you think DMs come from?
Same place as everyone else. They’re just a peculiar bunch of people who get more enjoyment out of supporting the players than being the heroes of the story. Not having one of those people means you are not equipped to play the game, just as much as if you didn’t have dice. You can try to put someone else in that slot, in the same way you can try to play Eberron as a setting using Werewolf: The Apocalypse rules, but your expectations will need to be low.
This sounds like a “GM is the entertainer” thing to me.
Either you think doing rolls is a mechanical burden that strips away immersion and reduces fun. In this case making the GM do all the rolls does the same to them and why would that be ok?
Or you don’t think rolling all the dice is a burden for the GM. Well then it wouldn’t be a burden for the players to do it either.
There are systems that are all player facing (players make all the rolls), but I’ve never heard of the system that expects the GM to make all the rolls.
Immediate flaw there; there is no immersion for the DM. You aren’t breaking their immersion because it can’t exist.
You could argue for breaking their flow, but that’s only an issue where they aren’t used to it. Once everyone is used to the flow of things, you shorten the workflow from ‘player:intent>player:declaration>DM:mechanical interpretation> DM:request>player:roll>player:report>DM:mechanical interpretation>DM:report>repeat’ to ‘player:intent>player:declaration>DM:mechanical interpretation>DM:report>repeat’
One of the problems that people have understanding RPG dynamics is the GM/DM is not playing the same game as everyone else. They aren’t an entertainer, like a Martin Clunes, they are an entertainer like a Martin Scorsese, or like a one-person, brain-powered Superblue. Their real role is in ‘making the magic happen.’ The players are ‘playing DnD’ or ‘playing Changeling’ or whatever. The GM, in any GM focused system, is playing The GM’s Game. It’s the same game, no matter which of the GM focused systems they are using to play The GM’s Game. Sometimes, the group of players is of a certain type, and the numbers don’t distract them. Such a group doesn’t need the GM to handle the numbers, but many players do find them distracting, and if the GM can handle it, it can make the game better, which means the GM is winning their game.
Several things:
First: Of course there is GM immersion. The GM has to be able to “see” the world in his mind so he can describe it adequately to the players. Immersion is more than just “feeling like you’re there”. Nobody at the table thinks they are an actual high wizard or barbarian or sth. You can tell by how they are saying “I swing my axe” instead of actually swinging an axe. Immersion just means how coherent and complete their mental picture of the world and their characters place in it is (which comes with an empathetic connection with the character). The GM is doing the same thing to a lesser degree for many characters (all NPCs at the least, but also the PCs).
Second: Your workflow diagram is only describing the simplest case of “Straight roll with predefined modifiers” and omits the kind of important part of actually rolling the dice and doing math with them.
Third: You entirely neglect the fact rolling a die is often actually fun. Blowing on it. Pleading with the dice gods to give you a good result. Yelling “NAT 20!” or whispering “NAT 1” in dismay (or whatever your systems equivalent is). Putting a badly performing die in prison. Borrowing the lucky die from another player and negotiating lending fees. Rolling 15d6 to see how much damage your nuclear leveled fire ball actually does.
Ultimately, you should play how you and your table enjoy it. I wouldn’t want to play at a table where some players (the GM is a player too) don’t get to make any rolls or have to make all the rolls. You do you, but to me that sounds like a terrible time.
PS: During the pandemic my table switched to a VTT and I enabled automatic saving throws. I had to disable that feature because my players HATED “the computer” rolling for them. They insisted that they must be the ones to click on the “roll saving throw” button. If I tried to take their rolling during live gaming I would loose the table.