My DM told me to stop fudging rolls, so I started rolling in the open

Last campaign, I kept quietly adjusting enemy crits because I was scared of killing the party. One player finally called me out after a near TPK and said, 'Let the dice tell the story, even if it hurts.' I switched to open rolling for all combat and now the tension at the table is unreal. My group actually cheers when I roll a nat 1 and groans when the goblin lands a 19. It also forced me to design encounters with escape routes and backup plans, which made me a better GM. Has anyone else gone from secret rolling to full transparency? How did your players react to the first real character death?

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the_lucas2d ago

Man, that exact thing happened to me in my last 5e campaign. I used to fudge all the time until the party's cleric got dropped by a bugbear crit and the player looked at me and said 'stop protecting us, we're not kids.' Once I went open table I had to redesign like 4 encounters on the fly because I realized my balance was way off. First real death hit hard, the whole table went quiet for a solid minute, but then the player started rolling up a new character with this crazy backstory that connected to the dead one and now everyone brings it up as the best session we ever had.