Perception is being able to to sense things with all five senses. Investigation is being able to deduce meaning from clues. Perception gives you clues, but doesn't help you decipher what they mean, Investigation lets you figure out what things mean but doesn't help you sense clues in the first place.
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Canto alla vita alla sua bellezza ad ogni sua ferita ogni sua carezza!
I sing to life and to its tragic beauty To pain and to strife, but all that dances through me The rise and the fall, I've lived through it all!
Perception is being able to to sense things with all five senses. Investigation is being able to deduce meaning from clues. Perception gives you clues, but doesn't help you decipher what they mean, Investigation lets you figure out what things mean but doesn't help you sense clues in the first place.
Very close to my interpretation, which is that perception lets you notice things. Investigation lets you deduce which of the things you notice are important (and why). Insight lets you sense which of the things you notice has some deeper meaning, but usually not why.
Examples:
You notice a person in the next room is saying things and even hear precisely what they are saying, despite the background noise (Perception success).
They mentioned the gray wharf, well known for fishing and grey herring fish. The the survivors of the raid mentioned the bandits smelling like herring! This person might know something about the bandits, might even be one of them! (Investigation success)
Wait, something's not right here. Their comments regarding the grey wharf sound like lies.... so maybe they are only pretending to be a bandit member? Or perhaps they are even a... red herring?? (Insight success)
Are they flipping through the contents of the drawers? Dumping each one out? Checking the bottoms of each and feeling around in the openings? Knocking on it to find hollows? Noticing that the drawers and their openings are all two inches too short?
Do you abstract it into a roll, or do you make them describe exactly how they do it?
If you make them describe, then not only do you potentially get the tedious laundry lists of investigative steps, but you break the separation of character and player. A naive farm boy isn't going to know how to toss a room, even if their player does. More importantly, somebody who's never thought about that sort of thing should be able to play an experienced thief, and not get penalized for it.
Old-school play prioritized player skill over character abilities and did without skills except for those to which specific classes had access.
Why?
Because a player of considerable intelligence stuck playing a character with low INT should be able to use his or her own intuition to figure something out. [And not allowing that is the further implication of what you propose in which a player who might not possess the intuition to think of something has a character with a high INT and just rolls to manage.] A player with a character with low INT should not just constantly feign ignorance and suffer the consequences of forever failing rolls. Good characters are characters who defy expectations. An intelligent character failing at something requiring intelligence because the player lacked the intuition to figure it out can be funny or be a source of further danger—and with it excitement—for the party.
If it's all about abstracting things into rolls. Reducing characters to numbers and not what they might be capable of in a moment where the player's intuition can have the character transcend those numbers. It's rollplaying and not roleplaying.
Old-school play prioritized player skill over character abilities and did without skills except for those to which specific classes had access.
Why?
Because a player of considerable intelligence stuck playing a character with low INT should be able to use his or her own intuition to figure something out. [And not allowing that is the further implication of what you propose in which a player who might not possess the intuition to think of something has a character with a high INT and just rolls to manage.] A player with a character with low INT should not just constantly feign ignorance and suffer the consequences of forever failing rolls. Good characters are characters who defy expectations. An intelligent character failing at something requiring intelligence because the player lacked the intuition to figure it out can be funny or be a source of further danger—and with it excitement—for the party.
If it's all about abstracting things into rolls. Reducing characters to numbers and not what they might be capable of in a moment where the player's intuition can have the character transcend those numbers. It's rollplaying and not roleplaying.
A distinction that has been made for decades.
I don't think I would enjoy that play style at all. Why would I let someone dump INT and still play as though they didn't? Seems unfair to everyone else at the table.
"All of which are things a good GM tries to get their players to do with their own brains.
Rolling Investigation, by the PHB’s standards of Investigation, is more-or-less equivalent to telling the GM that you’re giving up and would like the GM to give you the answer, provided you shiny math rocks number is big enough. Almost everything the Investigation skill accounts for are the things a player is supposed to be doing themselves, with no more assistance from the GM than a good, solid, consistent description of the scene.
Making logical deductions? That’s for the player to do, not for the GM to do for the player. The player rolling a die and saying “my Knows-Things number is [X], what does that let me know?” is not fun, engaging, or proper roleplaying.
Drawing connections between disparate clues? Again – that’s for the player to do. Rolling a die and saying “Is this number high enough for me to solve the mystery?” is terrible gameplay and makes it almost impossible to conduct any sort of proper mystery games/sessions.
Noticing patterns? Once more – that’s something a GM wants the players to do, not the dice. If the GM is deliberately establishing patterns for their players to pick up on, a player casually throwing a d20 and saying “does this let me know the plot?” is going to incense them. And frankly, if a GM is not deliberately establishing patterns, a player can throw all the dice in the world and get nothing. But if Alice-the-cleric says “Say, have you guys ever noticed...?” and lays out a pattern the GM had no idea they were laying down? Well. That is a super cool moment, and something the GM can absolutely use to better the game."
What a good DM does is different at every table. If you enjoy watching your players become frustrated at not being able to advance the plot, good for you. Trying to get most of our players to work through puzzles or clues is like pulling teeth, if they don't work it out in a few minutes we roll a die and move it on.
I’m lucky enough to always be playing with more than one DM and happen to be playing with two who exemplify the far ends of this spectrum right now. The first DM never has us search a physical location in game. We, the players, literally say to him “We toss the place,” and he provides us a list of what we find without a single roll or description beyond just that: “We toss the place.” We do however, in great detail, spend game time operating the tavern we own, talking to NPC’s, investigating clues we find, doing research at libraries and colleges, mobilizing our contacts, interacting with the world socially and generally advancing the plot(s). This game is rich with not only the main plot but also several inter-related subplots as well as dozens upon dozens of fleshed out NPC’s, gangs and other organizations so the one thing we never, ever do is spend valuable game time bickering with DM over whether and how we handled some specific object in precisely the correct fashion needed to reveal a thing.
The other DM is quite the opposite. We rarely do much other than have the rogue describing how he searches a room, tries to find a trap, how he disable the traps he finds and other pointless minutiae (while the rest of the group sits passively BTW). To paraphrase one particularly egregious instance: “You looked over, under, behind and between the statues; you wiggled every possible appendage, pushed on every part of the statue that could be a button, tried to rotate them, tried to move them forward and back as well as side to side but oops, you didn’t say you tilted them so sorry, after about a half hour of game time back and forth with the DM, you didn’t find the lever that reveals your loot…haha roll initiative because the ghouls were alerted by your fruitless messing about.” None of this ever seems to move the plot along. In fact, there is not much plot in that game at all, definitely no B plot or any kind of subplots. We move from combat to combat and spend the rest of the time playing gotcha with the DM, who seems to delight in getting us for not saying the exactly correct things to avoid said gotcha. We have gone several sessions without actually speaking to anyone. There have been entire sessions where my character (by virtue of being not-the-rogue) has done nothing at all other than watch the rogue try to do his thing.
I’m afraid that by my descriptions it’s painfully obvious which method I prefer. Frankly, if math-rocking in combat alone was not enough and I didn’t like the fellas in the group on a personal level so much, there’s no way I’d still be “playing” the second game. As Linklite (I do believe) alluded to: the dice rolling allows skipping the pointless bickering over minutiae in order to get on with really playing the game. I have been playing for over forty years. I spent a lot of time playing within the pointless bickering paradigm that more or less describes old school play and I simply do not understand how anyone is so enamoured of it. All the players are telling a story together, not trying to outsmart the one player at the table with all the information along with boundless tools and power at their disposal. Furthermore, if my success in the game is dependent on the abilities I have as the player, why do I have a character at all? If there is no way to portray a character as smarter/dumber or wiser/more rash or more/less socially capable than I am through dice rolls, what even is the point of Int, Wis and Cha in the game? I’m just playing myself over and over again, aren’t I?
"All of which are things a good GM tries to get their players to do with their own brains.
Rolling Investigation, by the PHB’s standards of Investigation, is more-or-less equivalent to telling the GM that you’re giving up and would like the GM to give you the answer, provided you shiny math rocks number is big enough. Almost everything the Investigation skill accounts for are the things a player is supposed to be doing themselves, with no more assistance from the GM than a good, solid, consistent description of the scene.
Making logical deductions? That’s for the player to do, not for the GM to do for the player. The player rolling a die and saying “my Knows-Things number is [X], what does that let me know?” is not fun, engaging, or proper roleplaying.
Drawing connections between disparate clues? Again – that’s for the player to do. Rolling a die and saying “Is this number high enough for me to solve the mystery?” is terrible gameplay
There are several things that make the skill necessary:
Players cannot know all the things that their characters know.
The GM cannot describe anything in as much detail as would be visible to the people actually there.
Trying to remedy either of the above makes things incredibly tedious, and doesn't help, because the players aren't going to retain information at that level of detail, anyway.
Investigation (and other skills) exist to close these gaps. They can toss the room, or search for secret doors, or examine the murder scene, or do research in the library, and the DM can sum up what their characters have learned or found. The decision to do so still rests on the players, and they presumably decide because of roleplaying reasons.
and makes it almost impossible to conduct any sort of proper mystery games/sessions.
Mysteries and puzzles generally get kind of weird and often don't really work in RPGs, because you usually end up making the players solve them with their brains and their real-world knowledge. The sort of puzzles that would actually exist in-world would often rely on world-building detail that even the DM is unlikely to have thought about. Making things the players can solve will often have to break verisimilitude.
Making logical deductions? That’s for the player to do....
Drawing connections between disparate clues? Again – that’s for the player to do.....
Noticing patterns? Once more – that’s something a GM wants the players to do, not the dice......
What if I'm not very good at making logical deductions, drawing connections between disparate clues, or noticing patterns? Am I now prohibited from playing characters that are? What if my fantasy is to play a Sherlock Holmes-esque character? Is that out of my reach?
Is the same true of other skills in the game? Do I need to be an Olympic gymnast to play a monk? Should I memorize the Forgotten Realms wiki before I try and play a wizard with grand historical knowledge. I dread to think what expectations are placed upon me if I want to play a character competent at arcana....
Sardonic absurdities aside, I would hope I've pressed upon you the importance of skills in D&D? They enable the fantasy the game is built upon. Few people want to play characters shackled by their own real life limitations, so I'm not sure why Investigation would be an exception to this?
DMs should make note of what characters might hear or smell or whatever dependent on their Passive Perception. But should never call for a Perception roll. Or let players just say Can I make a Perception roll? Why?
Because if the characters aren't doing anything how can they be actively trying to perceive something?
When we enter a room we hear something or we don't. That's passive perception. If we place our ear to the door on the opposite side of the room or something then and only then are we actively trying to perceive something.
Characters need to do things to warrant a roll.
What many are saying here is the skill check equivalent of what we see too often in combat.
There is little more boring at the table than when players spend round after round in combat repeating "I attack with my sword," when players should be encouraged to get creative. Think outside of the numbers.
This is what I love about Mighty Deeds of Arms in Dungeon Crawl Classics. Fighters have a deed die that they roll as well as that d20. They come up with something they would like to be able to do and if that deed die lands on a 3 or higher the Fighter does that thing.
That encourages creativity at the table.
A system like that is not necessary to encourager creativity at the table. I had a barbarian in a 5E campaign use a fallen adversary skewered with an arrow as a weapon. Because monotonously repeating 'I hit with my axe' is a dull as can be. As is 'Can I roll Investigation?'
That is exactly what I mean. Kids don't have the background to search in a drawer for hidden panels or go through books looking for a storage box or switch. Even some adults new to RPGs aren't sure about limits. Those familiar with fantasy computer games can have trouble because the computer game has limits and almost always gives a clue when you pan your mouse around.
I run games for children as part of my job. Children who often demonstrate far greater intuition than do many adult players I have played with.
I have run Call of Cthulhu for kids. A game in which investigation plays a prominent role and a lack of such intuition will spell disaster.
Many of us started playing D&D when we were kids and when the game was more about exploration than it is now. I think you have what is not only a very unrealistic but also a very condescending and insulting conception of children and their capabilities.
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Perception is being able to to sense things with all five senses. Investigation is being able to deduce meaning from clues. Perception gives you clues, but doesn't help you decipher what they mean, Investigation lets you figure out what things mean but doesn't help you sense clues in the first place.
Canto alla vita
alla sua bellezza
ad ogni sua ferita
ogni sua carezza!
I sing to life and to its tragic beauty
To pain and to strife, but all that dances through me
The rise and the fall, I've lived through it all!
Very close to my interpretation, which is that perception lets you notice things. Investigation lets you deduce which of the things you notice are important (and why). Insight lets you sense which of the things you notice has some deeper meaning, but usually not why.
Examples:
Old-school play prioritized player skill over character abilities and did without skills except for those to which specific classes had access.
Why?
Because a player of considerable intelligence stuck playing a character with low INT should be able to use his or her own intuition to figure something out. [And not allowing that is the further implication of what you propose in which a player who might not possess the intuition to think of something has a character with a high INT and just rolls to manage.] A player with a character with low INT should not just constantly feign ignorance and suffer the consequences of forever failing rolls. Good characters are characters who defy expectations. An intelligent character failing at something requiring intelligence because the player lacked the intuition to figure it out can be funny or be a source of further danger—and with it excitement—for the party.
If it's all about abstracting things into rolls. Reducing characters to numbers and not what they might be capable of in a moment where the player's intuition can have the character transcend those numbers. It's rollplaying and not roleplaying.
A distinction that has been made for decades.
I don't think I would enjoy that play style at all. Why would I let someone dump INT and still play as though they didn't? Seems unfair to everyone else at the table.
She/Her Player and Dungeon Master
Investigation is for clues. That's all.
If someone, try as they might, can't solve a puzzle, find a compartment, or something of the like, have them roll investigation.
Or, you know, just have investigation point them in the direction of the answer, without actually telling them the answer.
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"All of which are things a good GM tries to get their players to do with their own brains.
Rolling Investigation, by the PHB’s standards of Investigation, is more-or-less equivalent to telling the GM that you’re giving up and would like the GM to give you the answer, provided you shiny math rocks number is big enough. Almost everything the Investigation skill accounts for are the things a player is supposed to be doing themselves, with no more assistance from the GM than a good, solid, consistent description of the scene.
Making logical deductions? That’s for the player to do, not for the GM to do for the player. The player rolling a die and saying “my Knows-Things number is [X], what does that let me know?” is not fun, engaging, or proper roleplaying.
Drawing connections between disparate clues? Again – that’s for the player to do. Rolling a die and saying “Is this number high enough for me to solve the mystery?” is terrible gameplay and makes it almost impossible to conduct any sort of proper mystery games/sessions.
Noticing patterns? Once more – that’s something a GM wants the players to do, not the dice. If the GM is deliberately establishing patterns for their players to pick up on, a player casually throwing a d20 and saying “does this let me know the plot?” is going to incense them. And frankly, if a GM is not deliberately establishing patterns, a player can throw all the dice in the world and get nothing. But if Alice-the-cleric says “Say, have you guys ever noticed...?” and lays out a pattern the GM had no idea they were laying down? Well. That is a super cool moment, and something the GM can absolutely use to better the game."
What a good DM does is different at every table. If you enjoy watching your players become frustrated at not being able to advance the plot, good for you. Trying to get most of our players to work through puzzles or clues is like pulling teeth, if they don't work it out in a few minutes we roll a die and move it on.
I’m lucky enough to always be playing with more than one DM and happen to be playing with two who exemplify the far ends of this spectrum right now. The first DM never has us search a physical location in game. We, the players, literally say to him “We toss the place,” and he provides us a list of what we find without a single roll or description beyond just that: “We toss the place.” We do however, in great detail, spend game time operating the tavern we own, talking to NPC’s, investigating clues we find, doing research at libraries and colleges, mobilizing our contacts, interacting with the world socially and generally advancing the plot(s). This game is rich with not only the main plot but also several inter-related subplots as well as dozens upon dozens of fleshed out NPC’s, gangs and other organizations so the one thing we never, ever do is spend valuable game time bickering with DM over whether and how we handled some specific object in precisely the correct fashion needed to reveal a thing.
The other DM is quite the opposite. We rarely do much other than have the rogue describing how he searches a room, tries to find a trap, how he disable the traps he finds and other pointless minutiae (while the rest of the group sits passively BTW). To paraphrase one particularly egregious instance: “You looked over, under, behind and between the statues; you wiggled every possible appendage, pushed on every part of the statue that could be a button, tried to rotate them, tried to move them forward and back as well as side to side but oops, you didn’t say you tilted them so sorry, after about a half hour of game time back and forth with the DM, you didn’t find the lever that reveals your loot…haha roll initiative because the ghouls were alerted by your fruitless messing about.” None of this ever seems to move the plot along. In fact, there is not much plot in that game at all, definitely no B plot or any kind of subplots. We move from combat to combat and spend the rest of the time playing gotcha with the DM, who seems to delight in getting us for not saying the exactly correct things to avoid said gotcha. We have gone several sessions without actually speaking to anyone. There have been entire sessions where my character (by virtue of being not-the-rogue) has done nothing at all other than watch the rogue try to do his thing.
I’m afraid that by my descriptions it’s painfully obvious which method I prefer. Frankly, if math-rocking in combat alone was not enough and I didn’t like the fellas in the group on a personal level so much, there’s no way I’d still be “playing” the second game. As Linklite (I do believe) alluded to: the dice rolling allows skipping the pointless bickering over minutiae in order to get on with really playing the game. I have been playing for over forty years. I spent a lot of time playing within the pointless bickering paradigm that more or less describes old school play and I simply do not understand how anyone is so enamoured of it. All the players are telling a story together, not trying to outsmart the one player at the table with all the information along with boundless tools and power at their disposal. Furthermore, if my success in the game is dependent on the abilities I have as the player, why do I have a character at all? If there is no way to portray a character as smarter/dumber or wiser/more rash or more/less socially capable than I am through dice rolls, what even is the point of Int, Wis and Cha in the game? I’m just playing myself over and over again, aren’t I?
There are several things that make the skill necessary:
Investigation (and other skills) exist to close these gaps. They can toss the room, or search for secret doors, or examine the murder scene, or do research in the library, and the DM can sum up what their characters have learned or found. The decision to do so still rests on the players, and they presumably decide because of roleplaying reasons.
Mysteries and puzzles generally get kind of weird and often don't really work in RPGs, because you usually end up making the players solve them with their brains and their real-world knowledge. The sort of puzzles that would actually exist in-world would often rely on world-building detail that even the DM is unlikely to have thought about. Making things the players can solve will often have to break verisimilitude.
What if I'm not very good at making logical deductions, drawing connections between disparate clues, or noticing patterns? Am I now prohibited from playing characters that are? What if my fantasy is to play a Sherlock Holmes-esque character? Is that out of my reach?
Is the same true of other skills in the game? Do I need to be an Olympic gymnast to play a monk? Should I memorize the Forgotten Realms wiki before I try and play a wizard with grand historical knowledge. I dread to think what expectations are placed upon me if I want to play a character competent at arcana....
Sardonic absurdities aside, I would hope I've pressed upon you the importance of skills in D&D? They enable the fantasy the game is built upon. Few people want to play characters shackled by their own real life limitations, so I'm not sure why Investigation would be an exception to this?
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Consider Perception vs Passive Perception.
DMs should make note of what characters might hear or smell or whatever dependent on their Passive Perception. But should never call for a Perception roll. Or let players just say Can I make a Perception roll? Why?
Because if the characters aren't doing anything how can they be actively trying to perceive something?
When we enter a room we hear something or we don't. That's passive perception. If we place our ear to the door on the opposite side of the room or something then and only then are we actively trying to perceive something.
Characters need to do things to warrant a roll.
What many are saying here is the skill check equivalent of what we see too often in combat.
There is little more boring at the table than when players spend round after round in combat repeating "I attack with my sword," when players should be encouraged to get creative. Think outside of the numbers.
This is what I love about Mighty Deeds of Arms in Dungeon Crawl Classics. Fighters have a deed die that they roll as well as that d20. They come up with something they would like to be able to do and if that deed die lands on a 3 or higher the Fighter does that thing.
That encourages creativity at the table.
A system like that is not necessary to encourager creativity at the table. I had a barbarian in a 5E campaign use a fallen adversary skewered with an arrow as a weapon. Because monotonously repeating 'I hit with my axe' is a dull as can be. As is 'Can I roll Investigation?'
Investigate. Then you can roll.
I run games for children as part of my job. Children who often demonstrate far greater intuition than do many adult players I have played with.
I have run Call of Cthulhu for kids. A game in which investigation plays a prominent role and a lack of such intuition will spell disaster.
Many of us started playing D&D when we were kids and when the game was more about exploration than it is now. I think you have what is not only a very unrealistic but also a very condescending and insulting conception of children and their capabilities.