[sam the wise]

You have make your own skill checks otherwise you are contradicicding the rules

[Dthclaw]

No, actually, you aren't.

The rules in both the DMG and the PHB state that the DM should make some rolls in secret for their players. Precisely to prevent them from knowing automatically if they were successful or not.

[Raven Bloodmoon]

Somehow I missed this one....

My gaming group actually plays via MSN at the moment. As a result, I make all the rolls myself and then report the results in narrative form. It is worth mentioning, that thanks to things like multiple conversations, you can inform JUST the elf in the party that he sees a trap door or just the rogue that the mage is about to set off a trap. The players really seem to like it this way, as well. There is a minimum of OOC chatter and gamespeak, so everyone gets all the more emmersed in the story.

But yeah....BACK on topic....I make all the rolls and no one really complains.

[Dthclaw]

Erm... ALL the rolls? That I would object to, as that certainly would remove power from the players.

[Ssri-Tel-Quessir Hitokiri]

True it would remove some power from the players but you have to remember that he plays over the internet. Never know whether or not a player is fudging its rolls when you can't actually see them.

[Dthclaw]

Good point. You'd think they'd make some way of letting players make the rolls without giving them the opportunity to fudge. Aw well. Just not done yet, I guess.

[dragonhand777]

Raven Bloodmoon, on Oct 5 2005, 12:49 PM, said:

Somehow I missed this one....

My gaming group actually plays via MSN at the moment.  As a result, I make all the rolls myself and then report the results in narrative form.  It is worth mentioning, that thanks to things like multiple conversations, you can inform JUST the elf in the party that he sees a trap door or just the rogue that the mage is about to set off a trap.  The players really seem to like it this way, as well.  There is a minimum of OOC chatter and gamespeak, so everyone gets all the more emmersed in the story.

But yeah....BACK on topic....I make all the rolls and no one really complains.

Ssri-Tel-Quessir Hitokiri, on Oct 5 2005, 07:18 PM, said:

True it would remove some power from the players but you have to remember that he plays over the internet.  Never know whether or not a player is fudging its rolls when you can't actually see them.

I disagree with the DM making all the rolls. As a player or DM rolling the dice is part of the fun.

Also, as far as playing over the internets goes, need i remind you there are programs out there for this.

Tri Axe Dungeons & Dragons is a good one.

[Yurith]

There are whole programs, for running and playing games within. www.opnpw.com is one of them. There dice are shown to everybody.

I object to DMs rolling for players. There's a certain joy in personally rolling the 20. I know a lot of players who have their own lucky styling to their rolls. DMs shouldnt roll their characters.

[Vaskre]

I like rolling dice, but the most fun parts of DnD for me are 1) The roleplay. and 2) Character building.

I play in one of Raven's campaigns and I don't really notice that I'm not rolling dice for something. It seems to go pretty smoothly too, and I've never had an incident where I thought he was cheating the players / abusing him being the only one who gets to see the dice etc.

Also, if you go into an AIM chat room, there's a command to roll dice there.

It's //roll-dice#-sides#

example:

//roll-dice1-sides20

rolls a 1d20, and displays results to all.

[Yurith]

Life sucks if you hate AOL, however.

[Jimp]

I'm also playing in one of Raven's online campaigns. I don't mind him making all the rolls. If anything it lets me focus more on roleplaying my charatcer. The group I play with over here end up focusing more on the results of rolls than on who they're playing quite alot.
In general though I think that the player should make the majority of the rolls but some (such as Appraise, involuntary Spot and Listen to notice someone/something and anything to do with NPC) should be made by the DM since if the players saw them it could/would lead to metagaming.

[Curby]

When I'm Dming, I roll any and all rolls where the outcome could affect out of character knowledge. It's a house rule and if my players get their panties in a bunch, they're free to talk to me about it after the game session or during a game break.

I also make fake rolls, to keep the players on their toes, and have been known to fudge a rolls or two if things are going too easy for the PCs. An example is when I was attacking the group with a flesh golem and severely underestimated the chances the PCs had. By the end of the combat, they had actually done enough HP damage to have killed the beast four or five times over. I wanted the beast to be frightening and the situation scary and if they had blown through the beastie, it'ld have ruined the mood I had spent so much time building. It was the groups favorite encounter on the night because it wasn't as easy as they had expected.

A couple of the characters had been pretty severely wounded, but none were killed. I don't think it'ld have been fair to kill the characters with that particular monster because I was "cheating" and making the monster tougher than it should have been.

All of my PCs make their rolls, more or less, openly. Not that I trust them, but sometimes I'll make their successful roll a failure if it makes for a more dramatic adventure.