My players aren't narrating their actions as much as I want them to. Oftentimes, the narration is left solely up to me, the DM, and it's exhausting to come up with every successful (and failed) Ability Check, Attack Roll, and Saving Throw's narration. All (I was going to write "A majority" but this is more accurate, actually) my players' creative input right now is to roll the dice, see the number, look at me to say if they passed or failed, then silence as the game moves on.
To address this problem, what I want to do is give the players the Difficulty Class and Armor Class ahead of rolling. This way, they will know whether they succeeded or failed and can narrate accordingly.
What I'm asking is: What are the repercussions of this? Is this exploitable?
Best Answer
To answer your second question first, Yes. AC/DC (not the band) is exploitable.
Here is how. If they know the target AC they can try to game the system by knowing the target score and playing the fine line. Technically it will still be up to the dice (those can be fudged) but they might know whether or not something is a threat to them and it takes the mystery out of an encounter.
EX
As far as the repercussions, it dissolves suspension of disbelief and makes for less "mystery/discovery".
With DC its fundamentally the same. Try to describe the AC/DC of the object/monster with visual descriptions. A rusty lock is probably easier to pick than a pristine fancy one. An enemy covered in thick metal plating is probably harder to hit than one wearing leather. Describe their physique too, agile is just as hard to hit as tanky heavy armor.
The simplest solution, that I have implemented in my game, is to just say "how do you strike your enemy" allowing them to describe how they do their action, and then I dictate how the enemy reacts (regardless of success or failure). To add clarification here:
Ex (Miss):
Ex (Hit):