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.
My players always RP the roll and not the result, so if they roll a 3 they accept at face value what they are being told, or that the trap has been disarmed, or there is nothing suspicious in that corridor.
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My players always RP the roll and not the result, so if they roll a 3 they accept at face value what they are being told, or that the trap has been disarmed, or there is nothing suspicious in that corridor.