USING SKILLS IN D&D 5E

One of my pet peeves is having skills that seem good from a roleplaying perspective, but are almost useless in actual gameplay. Or having a super skill that seems to apply in every case. Here are my thoughts on how to straighten out some of them:

Perception vs. Investigation: Perception can be one of those super-skills and Investigation one of those nothing-skills. Or at least that's how I've seen it in play. In my game, Perception is more like situational awareness, peripheral vision or general discrimination among the senses. It is more passive than Investigation, which is more about detailed and systematic investigation of the scene.

• Avoiding surprise and/or gaining the advantage in combat? Perception.
• Listening at a door or trying to distinguish something you hear or see? Perception.
• Searching a room for treasure, clues, secret doors, etc.? Investigation.

Speaking Other Languages: In D&D, most everyone, including the monsters, speak some common language, whether it be the Common Tongue, or, in my current Ravnica campaign, Ravi. (Note: most everyone. The DM can move that slider wherever they want.) This is mostly a convenience so that most games don't become an RPG version of the Telephone Game.

But there are still ways to make languages matter in D&D. One of them is recognizing that people take pride in their language or how the use of a particular dialect can display prestige. Here are two tweaks that make language choices a bit more relevant.

• If you speak the same secondary language, your attempts to Persuade are automatically at Advantage.
• Conversely, if you don't speak their language, using Insight to judge their intentions when they are speaking their language is at a disadvantage. (This could also be justified or applied to situations where the speaker has an accent when speaking the common language. Their speech patterns through off the interpretation)

Knowledge Skills: The problem here is two-fold. You want the skills to be distinct enough so that someone is rewarded for picking this one, instead of that one. But you also want them to be generally useful. The key is to make them different and distinct, but with just a little overlap between them. Here is my current take:

• Arcana: Knowledge of magic, metaphysics, the planes, physical and magical laws that govern the omniverse.
• History: History, the Law, and politics.
• Religion: Religion, philosophy, the gods, the planes, ritual and etiquette.

Nature is the difficult one for me right now. How to make it distinct from Survival, but with some built in overlap?