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Message: <blockquote data-quote="jgsugden" data-source="post: 6571198" data-attributes="member: 2629">My simple approach: Perception is detection, other skills are understanding.  You may wish to use just perception, just another skill or both depending upon the circumstance ... and make different decisions even when the fact pattern is similar.For example, let's say that there is a trap dungeon with three rooms.  In each, the PCs must find the puzzle and then solve it to move on to the next room.Room 1: The puzzle is a set of giant buttons on the wall that must be pressed in the right order.  The order is hinted at by the symbols on the buttons.  In this instance, I might have the party skip a perception roll (the buttons are easy to see).  I'd ask them what they want to do to interact with or view the buttons and then give them an investigation roll (perhaps with advantage or disadvantage) with the results determining how many additional hints or misleads I give them.Room 2: This room's puzzle is that the exit is a secret door in the floor of the center of the chamber.  Once you find it, all you have to do is pull it open.  This would be a pure perception roll to see if they find it with no other roll involved.Room 3: This room is filled with thousands of tea cups.  Each teacup is placed carefully on a shelf.  There are dozens of different style of teacups.  Each teacup has a letter on the bottom.  If the PCs study the teacups, they can realize that there is a pattern to the placement of the teacups.  Once they figure out the pattern, they can identify which teacups to look at to get the letters ... which spell out a riddle.  Then they need to determine the answer to the riddle and figure out which tea cup needs to be switched with which other tea cup to get the door to open.  This would be a series of checks, some perception (do you see that the patterns in the teacups repeat?, can you find the teacups described by the riddle?) and some other (investigation to note the pattern?  investigate to get clues on the riddle?  arcana to determine that there is an enchantment surrounding certain of the cups?).  In the end, the answer is to let the DM determine what makes sense to the DM, to have the PCs roll the dice, and then move on without worrying if the DM's choice of skills was perfect or not.  This is a subjective situation and the best thing for subjective situations in D&D is to ask the DM, get an answer and move on...</blockquote>

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