I have very mixed feelings on secret checks. One the one hand, they make a lot of sense, they seem like they really help roleplay and being in character, and they generate suspense and uncertainty.
On the other hand, I like rolling my pretty math rocks. I’m a minor dice goblin, and my expensive RNGs demand to be rolled!
Which is fine, I’m the GM at my table, but if I were on the other side of the screen, I think it’d drive me a little crazy.
I also know that they’re a controversial topic more generally, and some players have really, really strong negative reactions to them.
So, how do you feel? Does your table use them? If not, why not? If so, how do they feel? Do you have anyone at the table with very strong feelings about them? If so, how have they articulated those feelings?
I am a GM and don’t do secret checks because I don’t feel they add anything to the game. If the players know I am rolling for something, they might as well be doing the rolling because they already know something is being randomized. I want players to roll with good and bad rolls without metagaming, so I don’t see a need to hide anything from them.
The biggest benefit is that there is less tedious rolling because why randomize a lot of common tasks the players should be good at when they are not under pressure? If the characters are competent they will take care of the small things the players might not think to say every time. If the players have creative ideas, let them succeed unless there is some kind of barrier or opposition.
What that leaves is still a lot of rolling, but in circumstances where they fail cooking breakfast on a sunny morning. They might fail in a snowstorm, or on rough seas, but then they also feel rewarded when they succeed on a roll against apparent odds.
They wouldn’t get that feeling if the roll was secret.
Wait… Is cooking a secret check, RAW? I’ve never bothered to look into the cooking guidelines.
It is a common example of “lol you fail 5% of the time any time you do a minor task” to mock the d20 system.
That’s one of the things levelled proficiencies helps with, though. It’s also what Assurance feats are for. At some point, they’re proficient enough that failure isn’t a reasonable option, and you just take Assurance.
Or, as a GM, you bypass Assurance and just not ask them to roll, because failure is not likely or interesting.
But I don’t know what this has to do with Secret checks. Cooking doesn’t have the Secret tag.