I guess that I'm just old school then, DM's always rolled dice behind the screen when I table topped and I was fine with it. If a DM wanted to screw the party, he wasn't a DM for very long. It gave the DM the option of not taking a crital that he rolled and killing a character as opposed to having to kill a character because the roll was in the open.<br/><br/>It's 6 of one, half a dozen of the other. But, I've seen enough people get frustrated over not seeing rolls arond here that I guess it's a less bold or shiny new world of universal DM trust. ;)<br/><br/>I think my least favorite example of DMing was with this guy who had a party of 6 mid-level characters. He had planned to have 6 players that night (The first night that I played as a replacement player) and was going to throw a fairly hard encounter at the party first thing.<br/><br/>When he only got 3 players (Including me) because it was finals week for 2 and 1 had a sick kid at home (They all called to let him know that they wouldn't be there), he decided that nothing needed t be changed in the encounter.  It was, as one might expect, a slaughter. 3 PC's killed almost outright.<br/><br/>When I asked why he hadn't adjusted the encounter to take into account that he only had 3 players, his response was, "The gods set this encounter in motion months ago, I couldn't change that."<br/><br/>I never played with him again as he was giggling and laughing each time a character was turned into so much toe-jam and the characters had no way to avoid the encounter.