Having players roll everything ruins immersion for me (If I'm the player). This is because some outcomes I shouldn't be aware of.

I've been playing with the idea of Players rolling actions; GMs rolling outcomes.

Anything the players are actively doing, they roll for. They want to smash a foe with a club, they make an attack roll. They want to jump out of the way of trap, they make a dodge roll.

The GM determines the outcome by making a roll to determine the severity of the successful\failed action. So in the previous examples, the gm would roll to determine the damage caused by the club, or whether the trap kills or simply harms the character.

The whole idea behind it is to encourage players to think less about the mechanical impact of their actions so they can fully immerse themselves in the game. It's the GM who has to worry about the mechanics and implications of what has occurred.

Quote from: Lynn;1124773I was reading this review of Golgotha and was surprised after presenting it as OSR that it doesn't have the GM roll dice at all. I have run ICONs before which uses such a mechanic and while interesting it does change the experience of the game. Would you still consider this an OSR game?

No. No I wouldn't.

Until I came online I presumed that having both GMs (for the world) and players (for their actions) rolling in the open was standard practice.

Why would a GM hide their rolls unless they occasionally lie about the results? What other purpose does it have. If you're going to use dice, do it in front of people and accept the results.

Quote from: TimothyWestwind;1126596Until I came online I presumed that having both GMs (for the world) and players (for their actions) rolling in the open was standard practice.

Why would a GM hide their rolls unless they occasionally lie about the results? What other purpose does it have. If you're going to use dice, do it in front of people and accept the results.

Rolls for results for which the characters have no way of noticing:  Wandering monster checks that don't produce anything (right now).  Checks to find hidden things that may not be there or may not be found.  And so forth.  Also occasionally rolls that have no meaning, but are done to make the players wonder if you doing one of those former things.

Now, I keep that kind of thing to a minimum by, where possible, not making the roll until the characters can know.  But there are times when to play it fair and consistently, I do need to know the result some time before the players do. For example, a wandering monster encounter turns up a stealthy creature that may very well react by avoiding the characters.  The characters interaction with that can be non-existent, or a very slight sensation felt way out of range (vague brush movement in the distance) which turns up nothing even if investigated.

Quote from: TimothyWestwind;1126596Until I came online I presumed that having both GMs (for the world) and players (for their actions) rolling in the open was standard practice.

Why would a GM hide their rolls unless they occasionally lie about the results? What other purpose does it have. If you're going to use dice, do it in front of people and accept the results.

It's used to create tension and uncertainty, and avoid metagaming knowledge in situations where players wouldn't know the outcome for certain--usually perception (including Insight, Investigation or similar detection variants) or knowledge rolls. If you roll a perception check out in the open, for example, and it comes out high but you tell players they found nothing then they know for certain there's nothing when their characters really wouldn't know for sure. Making that type of rolls in secret keeps them guessing.

Quote from: TimothyWestwind;1126596Until I came online I presumed that having both GMs (for the world) and players (for their actions) rolling in the open was standard practice.

Why would a GM hide their rolls unless they occasionally lie about the results? What other purpose does it have. If you're going to use dice, do it in front of people and accept the results.

As I mentioned in post #43 on this thread, I had one group of players who pushed me to make all rolls and handle all mechanics in secret, without revealing any of the numerical results (even for rolls made on the players' behalf), so that they could focus more on in-character thought without being distracted by game mechanical details.

But it's also relevant to your point to mention that they only started asking for this after months of playing together where I did roll openly (for anything their characters would be aware of) and they could see that I always took the die rolls as they were, with no fudging or "I don't like the result - roll again", so they trusted me to not lie about the results even if they weren't able to observe the rolls directly.

I would say that nominally, "The GM rolls everything" is slightly more feasible as OSR-acceptable than "The GM never rolls", but not by much.