GM announces out of nowhere that rocks fall, killing the party

>GM announces out of nowhere that rocks fall, killing the party
Everyone agrees this is shitty GMing

>GM announces out of nowhere that rocks fall, everyone roll reflex or against agility or whatever your system uses, really bad roll means you die, middlish rolls, you get hurt, good rolls mean you're unharmed
Hey man, whatever the dice dictate. You don't want to be writing a shitty novel at the gaming table, do you?

Why does this reasoning exist? Why is the outcome of the die roll held as sacred when the GM, often arbitrarily, can decide what dice totals yield success or failure and what "success" and "failure even mean?

Surely, if you want to play an RPG as a game (and not say as a collaborative storytelling experience) primary focus should be given on the PC decisions, their 'moves' so to speak, and not the dice rolls. If this wasn't an RPG, but say a wargame, random luck holding more of an impact than good play is the sign of a poorly designed game. Why should a gamist RPG experience be held to a different standard?

This thread would be more enjoyable if OP gave us a scenario for a specific character and we had to guide the character through it by a combination of dice rolls and poster input.

Vestige of adversarial GMing and because it seems fair(er) if an impartial arbiter, i.e. dice, is involved, no matter how little that involvement actually means.

...

Sounds like shitty GM in both situations to me

Fuck off, questshit.

I agree, but not everyone would, because some people at least view the problem with "rocks fall" as not giving the players a chance to roll to avoid their doom. The question was directed at that crowd.

>Why does this reasoning exist?
Does it? I was under the impression most reasonable people agree that this is retarded.

Go check out the oft-repeated John Wick story from the l5r rule book; "an example of showing consequences" we had a whole bunch of threads about it, and lots of people complaining that what the DM really did wrong in the situation was not allow the rogue player to roll before killing him off.

That crowd cannot tell the difference between making a roll and making a decision.