Nature vs Survival - Why are the separate skills? Any tips for better intuition about their distinction?
So my initial thought is they're separate skills because 1. tradition and 2. Paizo probably didn't want one of the magic tradition associated skills to be more useful than the others, but it really does feel weird that they're different skills considering how much overlap there is in their domains. Even in other systems like 5e where nature is int and survival is wis, the explanations that "nature is lore about the natural world and survival is how to survive in it" feels flimsy (survivalists do in fact need to know lore about the world they're trying to survive in). In 2e where they're both wis skills, I feel like it makes even less intuitive sense to me where to draw the line between things that are survival vs nature.
Like, if you want to identify if something is a particular edible plant or just a look-alike, would that be survival or nature? Seems pretty plausibly either because it's lore about a natural thing, but also key knowledge to be able to survive.
If I wanted to be able to butcher a venomous animal my party just defeated, it seems obvious that I should use survival to see if I can identify where that venom sack is and how to remove it safely, but if I identified that it was venomous with a nature recall knowledge while we were fighting it, why shouldn't that same nature knowledge inform how I remove the venom sack? Or otherwise, why did I use nature to RK about the animal rather than survival?
I get there are nuanced differences, but I feel like no two other skills step on each other's toes so much.
- Am I missing something that should make them obviously different in my mind?
- Does anyone have any good rules of thumb for which to use where for activities that could viably use both that aren't called out as specific activities in the skills' entries?
- Is the distinction really just so that one magical tradition RK skill isn't more useful than the rest?
- Should I be thinking of survival more divorced from nature to encompass foraging and tracking in the city and other places? (how to dumpster dive well and how to tell what district someone has been in based on the kind of pipe tobacco mixed with factory funk smell on their coat?)