D&D 5E Eyes of Minute Seeing: Investigation vs Perception

[Hriston]

When it comes to how sight is used, I think the difference between Investigation and Perception comes down to a matter of focus.

Investigation involves "looking for clues", which are essentially pieces of information with which to make deductions. Whereas the other skills associated with Intelligence rely on memory to "recall lore", Investigation often relies on sight for gathering information first hand for the purpose of deductive reasoning. Eyes of minute seeing would be very helpful in gathering such information because they allow you to see things that would otherwise be too small to be noticed. I would also give advantage to attempts to find information in a written document when using this item.

Perception, on the other hand, involves using inputs from your senses to form an awareness of your surroundings. Because eyes of minute seeing focus the gaze on a small, limited area they would actually be counterproductive when attempting to have a greater awareness of your general surroundings.

In short, the senses don't belong to any ability. D&D assumes everyone has 20/20 vision. It's what you do with the information your senses take in that determines which ability and which skill you're using.

 

[Saeviomagy]

I think the book designations for investigation and perception are poorly defined, heavily overlapping and generally a waste of time spent reading, let alone puzzling out what the designers mean.

I prefer to go with:
perception is finding things out without interacting with them
investigation is finding things out with interacting

Combined with the "roll a skill with a different attribute" means that investigation can be used to find traps, gather information, wipe down a scene for prints, find out what that red liquid actually is and potentially interrogate a prisoner if I don't think it warrants being played through.

Anyway, long story short, both 'eyes' apply to any visually oriented task involving things at the appropriate range and don't reference a specific skill at all. Most of the magic items benefit from being read that way - by what you can discern as intent and not by the poorly written rules text.

 

[iserith]

Yeah, I think the distinction between Investigation and Perception got a bit mangled between the playtest and the final version of the rules.

Yep. I'd bet on the verbiage of that item being something of an artifact left over from playtest.

In my view, Perception is finding or noticing. Investigation is deducing something useful based on things you've found or noticed. The latter is a particularly useful skill for confirming assumptions about the facts in hand. In this case, the eyes of minute seeing might be useful in making deductions if you have physical clues you can look at (versus, say, accounts from NPCs or the like).

 

[Jediking]

This is exactly why when 5E first came out I made my own decision:

Perception was for finding living objects that could move around and which were trying to hide from you (or were so far away you might not pick them out.)

Investigation was for finding inanimate objects that someone had to spend time trying to cover up and hide.

And this is why Flesh Golems stand out so much: everyone is able to notice the leaking, putrid carcass, unless it is hiding in the back of a butcher shop