Hello adventurers! Welcome to my spellbook and thank you so much for checking out the 81st episode of our feat series. Today we’re talking about telepathic 5e feat which a lot like telekinetic has like a weird history in 5e. So this is technically the third version of it that was released, the first version was really rough, the second they tried to put like a psionic spin on it but there’s not really too too much different between the second version and this current version as soon as you get past all that psionic stuff, they’re pretty similar.
In any cse before we dive into its description, if you’d like to checkout the full list of official 5e feats in its entirety you can click on that link up above there. In any case let’s move on to its description.
Description
Right off of the bat you get plus one to intelligence, wisdom or charisma make a small note of that because it will factor in later. You can speak telepathically to any creature you can see within 60 feet of you, your telepathic utterances are in a language you know and the creature understands you only if they know that language. So it is a little different than normal telepathy 5e.
Your communication doesn’t give the creature the ability to respond to you telepathically. So you can speak into their head but you can’t read their thoughts, which is important at least for that first half. The second half is a little different…you can cast the detect thoughts spell requiring no spell slot or components and you must finish a longrest before you can cast it this way again.
Your spellcasting ability for the spell is the ability increased by this feat. If you have a spell slots of second level or higher you can cast a spell with them. So this is really interesting it’s not true telepathy in the way that you can read their mind, they can read yours it’s like pseudo telepathy where you can implant your voice into their head and talk to them but they can’t respond in kind.
You can likely use a detect thoughts spell to gauge the reaction and that’s why i feel like this is in here. However you can only do that once per longrest without burning spell slots i mean whether or not it’s worth it yeah probably circumstantially based, however if you have something like the actor feat i would make it notable that you could likely put make it sound like they’re talking to themselves. And as a quick side note the duration for the detect thought spell is a minute.
However i don’t know it is one of those weird things where you have to be within 30 feet and if it doesn’t speak a language it’s unaffected i don’t know it is really weird. Without further ado and as far as it pertains to this feat let’s just go over the walkthrough really quick here. In case if you’ve missed our article on fey touched feat 5e make sure to check it.
Walkthrough
So just to simplify everything plus one to intelligence, wisdom or charisma while you’re within 60 feet you can telepathically communicate with the creature within range. There are some caveats to that like they have to be able to understand the language you’re speaking to them so it’s not universal. In addition to that you can’t respond back to you but as long as they’re within 60 feet you can talk to them which is nice.
and then once per long rest you can cast detect thoughts without any components or spell slots. So really nice stuff, once again once per long rest it does last for a minute it is concentration and your modifier for that spell is whatever you picked to initially increase from your ability scores so when you choose intelligence, wisdom or charisma that’s what you use. Now let’s get on to my personal thoughts.
Thoughts
So the mileage you’re gonna get out of this feat is gonna vary hugely. By that what i mean is there’s not a whole lot here that is applicable to combat or the exploration pillar. Almost all of this is focused on social interaction, i understand communicating telepathically it puts you in a good position when it comes to planning things out and is a good way to explain away a small amount of meta gaming within the game itself. That being said, a lot of groups just do that anyways and i tend to crack down on it as a dm but not a lot of DMs do.
So the telepathy isn’t super useful there. That’s also compounded by the fact that it’s one way and it has to be in a language both you and the creature communicating no. So that kind of eliminates a lot of the usefulness it had in previous iterations.
In addition to that the detect thoughts spell is cool! But it’s really only useful in social situations or during exposition or when you’re interrogating someone. It’s not really useful in combat to any meaningful capacity. In addition to that it’s not even used in exploration for the most part i can’t even think of a way you would be able to use it in exploration.
That being said, if you find yourself in a campaign where it’s a very political, there’s a lot of mysteries going on. Everyone may or may not be lying to you and you’re just you’re kind of backed up against the wall and you have no way of knowing for sure, then this feat would be super useful.
In addition to that if you’re a character that finds really isn’t pulling its weight in anything other than combat and you’d like to change that for whatever reason, this would be a good feat to go with and if you have the actor feat or some class ability that gives you something similar. There’s a lot of really cool role play opportunities you coudl run with this.
However that would require your DM’s approval by raw, it doesn’t say you can do that outright so you kind of have to infer. However i would allow in my games i feel like a lot of dungeon masters would respect that kind of creativity. So its relatively safe to assume would be allowable. That being said however once again is it super useful, is it worth sacrificing your ability score improvement is it better than a lot of the other dnd 5e feats we’ve gone over.
I want to say probably not, however i might be missing something small, you do get a pretty good plus one to whatever your spell casting modifier is so it might be worth it just for that. However i don’t know maybe i’m being too hard on it. Let me know what you think down beneath in the comments section.
Conclusion
Mention any thoughts, questions, comments or concerns you have regarding telepathic. As well as any cool build ideas or anything that you might disagree with me on. And as always guys have a great day and happy adventuring.