bigbadron:
+1 because this is absolutely not the same thing as a GM secret roll on behalf of the player.
While a GM could just make a secret roll, doing so can leave players feeling that they have no connection to the result.
What it seems like is this gives the player more of a sense of ownership in the roll? It still
has no impact on the fairness of any particular roll. The dice roller cares not, so long as a roll is made, it will spit out as nearly a random result as its algorithm is capable of producing.
I'm not saying that how the player feels about the roll is unimportant, nor am I saying I'm vehemently opposed to doing this. I just feel the two are
pro forma equivalents in that they both produce the same results for any particularly defined roll whether the player pushes the button or the GM does. To wit: a random result in the domain specified by the dice= portion of the roller's command, said result being hidden from the player's sight.
quote:
Additionally, since a GM secret roll is entirely hidden, with no record that it was even made visible to the player he was rolling for, a bad spell on the roller can leave players thinking, "Gee! Another 1. Is he really rolling, or is he just telling me that he is, and auto-failing my skill checks?"
With the Blind Roll as narrowly defined, the player would be blind to the actual result, anyway, so where's the verify-ability? (I mean, unless the "reveal" option is implemented...) Am I missing something here?
Sequences of low numbers can occur, just like sequences of high numbers can, and there are all sorts of gamer superstitions about this sort of thing. (I've actually seen someone use salt and sage smoke to "purify" their dice(!), but I digress...) If the player can't trust the GM to be honest about it, why even play?
Let's switch gears for a bit: Technically speaking, what sort of coding would be needed to implement such a feature? If the coding is trivial, why not? On the other hand, if the desired feature set (I'm thinking the "reveal later" function) makes it an unwieldy task that turns our dice roller into a kludge, well...