this post was submitted on 31 Oct 2025
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This is the heart of tons of table drama. The DM wants to tell a story and the players want to be heroic. The dice add randomness that can add drama, but they also cause chaos by introduction outcomes people don't want.
If you're just trusting the DM, why have rolls at all? Just tell GM what you're doing and GM tells you what happens. But then players feel like they've got less heroic agency. They're not pulling together a brunch of cool traits to do something risky and daring. They're saying "I leap over the battlement and drive my spear into the champion's throat" and the DM either says "Yeah" or "Nah". You need phenomenal trust in your GM for that to work. A bunch of 12 year olds at a table aren't going to have that.
The mechanics are, ostensibly, there to facilitate the roleplay. The paladin's smite isn't just a set of numbers, it's an expression of their role as holy warrior and divine judge.
That's why you would keep the randomness of the dice, but isolate it. It's easy to trust a DM to be reasonable when it comes to some things, but the randomness is useful in making the play more interesting, and people aren't great at creating statistically distributed randomness. And if your DM is just looking at the die and saying, 'yah' or 'nah,' they shouldn't be your DM. If your players can't handle being told their characters' attack didn't land, they aren't ready to play the game. It isn't possible to win or lose DnD, but it's absolutely possible to succeed or fail to play.
And you wouldn't be removing the mechanical elements, such as the smite, just putting player focus on the diegetic space. They can still smite, but with their attention spent on thinking about the righteous smash of their weapon against the enemy's armour and less on going 'okay, then we carry the one, and...'
Where do you think DMs come from?
Same place as everyone else. They're just a peculiar bunch of people who get more enjoyment out of supporting the players than being the heroes of the story. Not having one of those people means you are not equipped to play the game, just as much as if you didn't have dice. You can try to put someone else in that slot, in the same way you can try to play Eberron as a setting using Werewolf: The Apocalypse rules, but your expectations will need to be low.