this post was submitted on 28 Mar 2024
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As a GM, you should have a sheet with the stats for your PCs that determine these kinds of rolls. If the PC wouldn't know if they succeed or fail, then the player shouldn't know the result of the roll, or sometimes even what the roll is for in the first place.
It's hard to avoid metagaming when you very clearly failed a roll and the GM says "Everything seems fine and normal to you"
That's why you call rolls for no reason, though.
Or trust your players to metagame in the opposite direction, making terrible decisions.
When the low rolling character convinces the high rolling one, that they are seeing things, the real fun begins.
Didn't old school D&D have the DM roll on the player's behalf?
I mostly disagree. It takes away a feeling of agency even if its still random at the end of the day. Just trust your players not to meta game. There are exceptions when it would be hard for the player to still get the intended experience when not meta gaming; but leaving the existence of that experience up to a roll in the first place is probably whats at fault.
Perception stats exist for a reason, and I'd argue they're usually incompatible with knowing the result of the roll, even with players who try not to meta-game. Even if they behave, they're subconsciously going to know how they rolled and that will change the experience, unless you start meta-meta-gaming (changing the success window, frequently calling for rolls for nothing, etc.). Personally that seems like a pound of cure vs an ounce of prevention.
If a semi-spoiler-laden, actively counter-meta-gamed experience is what your group likes, more power to you. But more often than not, I think the GM rolling for checks where success/failure isn't obvious preserves the experience for all players and prevents meta-gaming, both intentional and subconscious.
My experience is that, in practice, players actually like secret checks more often than they don't. The feel-bad of "player agency" loss (what agency is there in rolling a die? It's literally an agency destroying mechanic) occurs at the conceptual level, long before ever experiencing it at the table. Telling a player that just hid that they don't think the guards can see them really heightens the immersion, and players tend (most of them, most of the time, on average) to get into that.
You can't have tension when the player knows they rolled a 19 on the die.