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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Charlaquin" data-source="post: 8720005" data-attributes="member: 6779196">As I said before, ask 5 DMs when they call for perception vs investigation and you’ll get 6 different answers. I don’t agree with your interpretation of perception vs investigation, but I stopped caring to litigate that particular bit of minutia a long time ago. Now I call for a Wisdom check if the action relies on intuition or sensory perception or an Intelligence check if it relies on memory or deduction, and let the player decide if they think one of their proficiencies is applicable. If you tell me you’re running your finger over the books on the bookshelf (for what purpose? You didn’t say. For the sake of expediency I’ll assume maybe you’re hoping to find a false book or hidden catch or something), I’m gonna call for a Wisdom check. If you’re proficient in Investigation and you think that seems appropriate to add your proficiency bonus for, be my guest.How is the goblin hidden in the corner? If it’s behind some cover or concealment, you’re not going to find it just by looking with your eyes. If it’s just hiding in the darkness, you’re not going to see it unless you have a light source or Darkvision… in which case it wouldn’t be hidden from you. So, I don’t see any way just looking at the corner could result in you noticing the goblin. You are going to have to do something to try and find it, and if that something has an uncertain outcome, I’ll call for an ability check to resolve that.“I look around” is good enough for a perception check, and since looking around is something a character is always doing (assuming they can see, I guess), they are performing that action continuously over time, so I use a passive check to resolve it, as per the rules. If you want to find out if there is something hidden in the environment that was not revealed by your passive perception check, you’ll need to take another action.Yes, just like how if I’m trying to find my keys and I don’t know where they are, I will fail if I look in a place that isn’t where they are. That’s… how looking for stuff works.Only if the DM doesn’t provide them any information they can use to inform their decisions. This is why telegraphing is important. Players need information to make informed decisions, they need to have a clear picture of the environment to interact with it in meaningful ways.Again, only if the DM doesn’t make good use of telegraphing, and ideally, time pressure. A source of pressure like regularly-timed checks for wandering monsters or other complications encourage players to be economical with how they decide to spend their characters’ precious time, and telegraphing enables them to do so by giving them enough information to determine what to prioritize.This is undesirable because it puts the burden of deciding what the character is actually doing in the fiction on the DM.Look, you know what you hope will happen if you succeed on a Religion check or whatever, just tell me what that is. Otherwise, I won’t know if what you hope will happen is possible or not.You assume that there’s some hidden information I’m locking behind guessing the correct thing to ask for. This is not the case. I will include pertinent details in my description of the environment, because that’s my job as DM. If it’s unusual for an idol of Shar to be made of purple amethyst, and that’s something the character should know based on their background, I’m just going to tell them so. Asking them to roll a check for it would be silly, because checks can fail and if it’s something their character should know, they shouldn’t be able to fail at it. If they want to know something about it that I didn’t include in the description, they’re going to have to tell me what else they want to know because I can’t read their minds. And they’re going to have to tell me how their character might already know that or how they go about trying to learn it so I can determine if it can work or fail to work.Great, then they should say so. I can’t read their minds.If it should be obvious then I’ll include it in my narration.Because maybe they could have picked that information up somewhere other than where they acquired their proficiency from. People pick up random bits of information from all over the place, not just formalized training. Heck, the character doesn’t even need to have had any formalized training to potentially know something. Saying “Oh, I had a cousin who was a cleric of Shar, do I remember anything else about idols from stories he told me,” even if it’s made up on the spot, provides a bit of fun roleplaying color and gives me something to latch onto to assess if a check is necessary and what the DC should be if it is. That’s fine, but they need to tell me that or I won’t know it because I can’t read their minds.There is, and characters perform it constantly, hence a passive check being used to resolve it.Well, again, I call for ability checks and let the player determine if they think one of their proficiencies is relevant. But, back when I would call for skills explicitly, I would generally call for Perception any time I would now call for Wisdom (which is to say. when success hinges on sensory awareness) and Investigation when I would now call for Intelligence (which is to say, when success hinges on deductive reasoning). I actually find myself calling for the former much more often than the latter.I mean I try not to expect anything in particular and simply to respond to what the players do. But, if you want an example of something I as a player might do in response to an NPC being described as unusually sweaty, I might say, “I pay close attention to his body language to see if I can spot any notable tics or tells.” And if a player declared that action, I might have the NPC roll Deception against the PC’s passive Wisdom (Insight) if he lied. Alternatively, I might want to try to learn an NPC’s personality traits, ideal, bond, or flaws, which Insight is explicitly able to be used to do. So, I might say something like “I want to try and figure out this guy’s bond. I’ll start making small talk and try to steer the conversation towards his personal life, paying close attention for if he seems to show any particular attachment to someone or something.” If a player described an action like that, I would most likely ask them to make a Wisdom check, probably against a moderate DC (so 15) unless I had a good reason to go easier or harder, and say “on a failure he’ll catch on that you’re trying to get leverage on him.”</blockquote>

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