Looking at the 5th Edition SRD - part 13 - Discovery, Manipulation and Communication Actions

    I've been using a system that breaks a game's rules into 5 categories: Exploring, Investigating, Manipulating, Communicating and Fighting.  Last post I looked at what Exploring rules the 5e SRD has.  This post I am going to try to go through the next 3 types, because I'm pretty sure there isn't a lot to talk about in any one of them, I know Fighting has the most page count (so it will be next post).

Discovery Challenges

    So Discovery is all about learning information, as you might guess from the title.  This is different from Perception, which is actually a part of Exploring.  Perception is about noticing the environment, the things around you weather living or not (well, as used in the SRD, I personally don't think perception should be a separate skill as I mentioned in one of my posts).  Discovery is about understanding something, about seeing it deeper than the surface level.  This is the core challenge type in a mystery story (seeing what happened is not the problem, look at that big blood stain, it's interpreting what you see, what weapon did that/ who did that, is the challenge), and also encompasses riddles and puzzles.  Things that have a deeper, hidden complexity by nature.
    What kinds of skills does the SRD have for this type of challenge?  Well...

• Arcana
• History
• Insight
• Investigation
• Medicine
• Nature
• Religion

    And what sections of the rules cover this type?
None, none at all really

    This type is rough in the SRD because while there are a few skills in the system, there is nothing at all about how exactly to use them.  If I want to use Religion to identify the type or abilities of an undead creature, can I?  What's the DC?  What information can I get?  If there is a puzzle about moving rings or a riddle about carrying geese and foxes and beans across a pond is that just a plain Intelligence check?  Again, what DC?  Or are we supposed to "role-play" it only and if I can't personally figure it out then I'm tough out of luck?
    Mysteries and puzzles are some of the hardest things to pull off in an RPG, it's too bad that the SRD doesn't give you any help with them.

Manipulation Challenges

    Exploring set the environment, and let you see and interact with the surface of the things around you.  Discovery let's you see under the surface.  And then Manipulating is about changing that inner nature of things and people.  Crafting is changing raw material into items, healing is changing a damaged body back into a whole one, so both are Manipulation.  An adventure that focused on Manipulation challenges would be something like a hacker in a heist or cyberpunk story - manipulating security - or creating a forgery to replace an item with, or trying to stop a plague.  Of course, while I categorize the challenges to try to organize related skills, abilities and rules together- in a typical adventure there would be a mix of challenge types.

    So what skills are there in the SRD?
        Well, none of the skills really apply except for Medicine
        Mostly this is the area of Tool Proficiencies, which I haven't really addressed until now because the SRD itself doesn't really address them at all, so now's as good a time as any.

Tool Proficencies
    Tools are a strange thing in the SRD.  They feel like an afterthought, like somebody designed the rules and then went, hey, wait, we totally forgot about crafting items, and we don't really know how we want to handle crafting items, and we don't want to add more skills so let's make them skills that are not skills so we can say they're there and hopefully nobody will really care or notice that we totally had no idea about what we were doing.
    Okay, I'm being hostile, actually there is a sort of sense to the skill vs tools system.  If skills are things you can do innately, and tools profs are things you cannot do on your own, then there is a sense in dividing them.  The problem is that they don't really divide that way cleanly.  Take Stealth, that should be a skill because you can hide any time you want, right?  But then what about camouflage clothing?  A black ninja outfit?  Those should help you hide (in the appropriate environments at least) weather you're personally 'good' or 'skilled' at hiding or not, right?
    An easy way to see this is in the system itself.  There is the Medicine skill and the Herbalist Tools, or the Perform skill and Musical Instrument tools. Heck, there are even tool kits, like woodworking and the forger's kit - which overlap if you want to make a forgery of a wooden carving.  So if you only have one of these (kit or skill) can you do the same things?  And what if you have both?
    Now, the system did try to clarify some of this in Xanathar's Guide To Everything.  The thing is though, they didn't add any of that material to the SRD (as of this writing).  Right now I'm not reviewing DnD, I'm reviewing just the SRD, the part of it that you can use to build your own games (which I intend to do down the road).  So for the purposes of this review, these are all questions with no answers.

    Okay, back to the SRD.  So most of Manipulating is in the Tool Proficiencies, but what other rules are there?

Diseases are just over a page, with 4 examples, and no useful advise or guidance at all for creating your own or how to treat them

Madness is another just-over-page of random tables.  I hate random tables in madness/ sanity systems- trauma is not random, it is very much based on whatever the triggering event was (though, granted, it can pop up at seemingly random times/associations)

Objects is a 1 page section that gives you some basic guidelines to dealing with inanimate stuff, okay for being so short

Poisons is a little over a page, and has the same problems as in earlier editions of the d20 system.  Poison tends to be over-priced for the effects, the save DCs are pretty low so they're mostly just good against low-level monsters, and there are no DCs or steps mentioned for how to cure them with either the Medicine skill or Herbalist Kit Proficiency (in fact, neither the skill nor kit say they can actually be used to cure a poison or disease, only to "diagnose" for medicine or "create antitoxin" for herbalist)

    So basically the SRD has very few rules and most of them are useless.

Communication Challenges

    Manipulation deals with the player/ active character making changes in something else.  Talking between two sentient creatures falls into it's own category, Communication.  People are complex, and layered in their motivations and actions, so this subject is worth its own Challenge Type.
    Sadly, just as with Manipulation there is a lack of any sort of rules.  There are a whopping 5 skills related directly to Communication:

• Insight - used to figure out what a character is thinking/ feeling
• Deception - for lying to people, including disguise (though, of course there is also a disguise kit)
• Intimidation - to threaten someone
• Performance - to entertain someone/ a group
• Persuasion - to 'play nice' with others (almost its exact description)

    And in terms of rules there are none at all.  No guidance whatsoever on how to set up or run a conversation or an adventure that relied on interpersonal interactions.  No DCs or what should be/ shouldn't be possible.  So if you wanted to run a Game of Thrones-inspired campaign good luck with all the politics and drama.

    Okay, so we've covered 4 of the 5 Challenge Types, and while these have had few useful rules at least the last one I know has some detailed material, because we're going to wrap things up with a look at Fighting - next post.


You can find the rest of this series here