I have heard of games where the DM literally narrates the whole thing and rolls all the dice, and the players' roles are to provide the characters intents rather than to roll the dice. I've never played in one like this (I don't think I would, I like rolling dice). However, I came across a couple of instances in my last session (first time DMing) where I feel like perhaps I should have rolled the dice for them so they didn't know what they rolled.

I am contemplating rolling things which have no obvious success or failure myself - so a characters skill in, say, investigation is used, but the player isn't like "I rolled a 4, and I didn't find anything, but I know I rolled badly". It's to remove meta-knowledge and try to help immersion. Obviously things like "try to lift this" or "try to climb that" can be rolled by the players as they will know if they failed by the response - "you do lift this", "you fail to climb that". But if they say "I check for footprints", roll a 2, and I say "you see no footprints", they know there might be footprints they rolled too low to see. If I roll for them, they don't know if the roll was a 2 or a 19, so have no meta knowledge of the checks actual success.

Another example might be a secret poison, where you roll constitution saves for the player so they don't know they are having to roll them.

How do you go about dice? Is it all for the player, all for the DM, or a mixture?

I always have the players roll their own dice. Part of it is because I have a bard in my party who is pretty generous with Bardic Inspiration, and as much as I like the idea of, say... rolling an INT Save for them to determine whether an illusion actually tricks them, I don't want to have a situation where they're saying, "Yeah, but if I knew that I would have used my Bardic Inspiration to challenge it". I trust my players to generally lean into the roleplay and avoid metagaming... if I tell them an illusion or something worked on them, they'll treat it as real until they reach a logical conclusion not to.

I do not think it's a good idea to roll for a player. It takes away from their agency in the game and rolling dice is a lot of fun. If there is ever a situation where I do not actively want them to roll for success or failure, I use passive scores. Even when there is a situation where a player can't roll for themselves (e.g. we're playing online and one person cannot use the dice bot due to limitations on their phone) I would have another player roll for them instead of myself, unless I was specifically asked to roll by the player in question.

Quote from TransmorpherDDS >>

I always have the players roll their own dice. Part of it is because I have a bard in my party who is pretty generous with Bardic Inspiration, and as much as I like the idea of, say... rolling an INT Save for them to determine whether an illusion actually tricks them, I don't want to have a situation where they're saying, "Yeah, but if I knew that I would have used my Bardic Inspiration to challenge it". I trust my players to generally lean into the roleplay and avoid metagaming... if I tell them an illusion or something worked on them, they'll treat it as real until they reach a logical conclusion not to.

 That's a valid point. I suppose you could tell them that you're rolling, or even have them roll the dice behind your screen (where they can't see it) so they know whether they want to add bardic inspiration to it, but still only tell them the result and not the number they rolled.

My players recently opted to have death saves rolled in secret by the DM.  They suggested this based on the idea that keeping the players in suspense would add to the tension and help them avoid unintentionally meta-gaming when a party member was in peril.
I fully support them in this.

There are two situations where I’ve considered rolling for the players, but I’ve found solutions where they can roll for themselves. The obvious one is Insight to see if an NPC is lying. If they don’t meet the DC, I don’t tell them “you think they’re telling the truth,” but “you have no way to tell if they’re lying or not.” And the other one is death saves: we also do blind death saves, but the players still roll them, and keep them secret from both me and the other players. Blind death saves are the best though!

Quote from NaivaraArnuanna >>

There are two situations where I’ve considered rolling for the players, but I’ve found solutions where they can roll for themselves. The obvious one is Insight to see if an NPC is lying. If they don’t meet the DC, I don’t tell them “you think they’re telling the truth,” but “you have no way to tell if they’re lying or not.” And the other one is death saves: we also do blind death saves, but the players still roll them, and keep them secret from both me and the other players. Blind death saves are the best though!

 You should never roll insight for your players, roll deception against their passive insight instead.

Quote from Eriniel >>

My players recently opted to have death saves rolled in secret by the DM.  They suggested this based on the idea that keeping the players in suspense would add to the tension and help them avoid unintentionally meta-gaming when a party member was in peril.
I fully support them in this.

 I refused to do this as a DM but what we have is the dice tower of death. The player puts the dice in but it comes out behind my dm screen so only I see it 

Almost never but I think there are a few times you want the DM to roll so it doesn't break the immersion, I rolled for the stealth checks  in our las session, I didn't want them to know if they had rolled very high or low I did narrate some indication how well they were doing, partly because I didn't want them to act on a false assumption (that they were fine if they rolled high, they would not be, nor would they automatically be detected if they rolled low, other things they were doing were at least as important).

So far, I have always had them roll their own stuff.

I am not ruling out that there might be a circumstance in which I would want to roll for them, but so far 32 sessions and almost 8 levels into it, I have not rolled for them.

Some of it is going to depend on your relationship to the group. Most games I’ve DM’d I’ve had players who wouldn’t metagame. Like if they roll their find traps and flub the roll, and I tell them they find nothing, they will proceed in the same way they would as if they rolled a nat 20. Same as how players sometimes need to trust the DM not to screw them, the DM needs to trust the players.

On a related note, I will occasionally make a random roll behind the screen for no reason, then pretend to write something down. Though I think a lot of DMs do that.

I would roll dice for the players only when they don’t know they have advantage or disadvantage, letting them roll one die, and secretly rolling the other. Rolling for them is a tell just as much as ‘oh, look, we rolled low, there’s probably something there’- why now, they might ask. It shows them that something is different about this particular check. Secret death saves is also interesting- but, as a player, I know I would like to be able to prioritize the player who failed two versus the player who saved two. I’ll admit though, as a DM, the idea is... intriguing. 🤔

I don't like the idea of ever rolling on a player's behalf, especially when the game provides the mechanism to avoid it.  Want to keep your players from knowing how they did on stealth? Take their passive stealth and roll perception against it.  Don't want your players to know how they did while checking for traps? (half the time that should be a passive check anyway since they're effectively checking every 5 ft) Roll the trapmaker's skill at hiding traps against their passive.

As for the death saves, they represent having taken an injury that's potentially lethal, but it's entirely reasonable for people to be able to evaluate the condition of the downed character.  Instead of thinking about death saves as the character getting better or worse, the characters (and thus the players) are getting a better idea of how badly injured they were.

I only ever rolled when a player was absent in order to keep the narrative going.

If you're present, roll your own dice. Even in the case of something like Stealth. A player knows they made a bad roll and the PC knows they stepped on a dry twig.

Quote from Lunali >>

Don't want your players to know how they did while checking for traps? (half the time that should be a passive check anyway since they're effectively checking every 5 ft) Roll the trapmaker's skill at hiding traps against their passive.

That's a very interesting way to look at it instead. I like it - if a player is poisoned, give the poison a "strength" modifier and roll against their passive constitution. If they are searching a room, roll against their passive investigation to determine how well hidden the thing is. If they describe a specific action, then let them roll for it.

I think I will steal this.

I quite like the tension created with rolling perception checks.... no you don't spot any deadly traps 

Quote from JustinDarkness >>

I quite like the tension created with rolling perception checks.... no you don't spot any deadly traps 

 "You step on a trigger plate, and a whirling blade slashes across your chest for 27 damage."

"You said there were no deadly traps!"

"You dead?"

"No.

"Well, there you go."

Quote from Lunali >>

Quote from NaivaraArnuanna >>

There are two situations where I’ve considered rolling for the players, but I’ve found solutions where they can roll for themselves. The obvious one is Insight to see if an NPC is lying. If they don’t meet the DC, I don’t tell them “you think they’re telling the truth,” but “you have no way to tell if they’re lying or not.” And the other one is death saves: we also do blind death saves, but the players still roll them, and keep them secret from both me and the other players. Blind death saves are the best though!

 You should never roll insight for your players, roll deception against their passive insight instead.

 That's all well and good and would totally work if you controlled everyone in the story, but the point is that you have a situation where the player says, "I want to roll Insight to see if the Baron is telling the truth." After they roll, you tell them, "He seems sincere to you."

In situation A, they rolled a 3. In situation B, they rolled a 21. Regardless of what the characters do next, the players will proceed differently between those two situations 95% of the time. In situation A, they are in the same place they were before the roll and will proceed cautiously with this uncertainty large in their minds. In B, they trust the Baron and move on.

The point of hiding the roll is to remove that disparity. The players are as clueless as the characters as to whether they have accurately sensed the Baron's motives. There is value in this approach. It can add a lot of tension and drama. But it can also add frustration.

My sticking point is that in real life, most of the time you know when you screwed up. One that really gets me is when the DM wants to roll our stealth checks so we don't know how well we did. In that kind of situation I think doing poorly would be readily apparent.

Similarly, a failed Insight check could be described either as you completely buying the NPC's deception or you determining that they are too difficult for you to read either way. With the former, you don't know if you screwed up. With the latter, you do. I would argue that the former probably makes a more compelling story. That being said, I have never actually done it.

Team Death Saves. I roll them in secret.

Everything else is in the hands of my players, and I am reminding my players if they start meta-gaming with the knowledge of their roll results.

Since I use a VTT (Foundry), if I ever need to have a player roll something and not know what they are rolling or the result, I will ask them to do a GM roll of d20, and I will look up and add their bonuses. Obviously they would know "something" is up but not what.

Again, I have not had occasion to do this yet.