Cool builds based on the Telepathic feat

[follacchioso]

The Telepathic Feat has limited combat utilities, but great RP opportunities.

My favourite feature is the ability to cast Detect Thought without any components. This means you can cast it, once per day, without anybody noticing you actually casted it.

Here are a few character ideas I had based on this. Do you have more?

The Fortune Teller Bard
This is a College of Spirits or Whispers bard, with the Telepathic feat.
He is a renowned Fortune Teller, who only lends his services once per day, meaning it is very difficult and expensive to get hold of him. If you manage to get an appointment with him, thought, you will not be disappointed. His ability to speak with the spirits is demonstrated by the fact that he knows things that only you and the dead person knew; and he seems to know you better than you do yourself.

Father Simon, the cleric
Father Simon will always listen to your confessions. But he knows what you are going to say, before you say it. You can't hide your secrets from him - but there is no need to worry, he will not betray you.

[Burley]

The Telepathic Feat has limited combat utilities, but great RP opportunities.

I'd argue that being able to silently and instantly communicate with your party moves the feat away from "limited combat utilities." You can tell your allies that you intend to flank the enemy, let them know when you need healing, call out weaknesses, etc. Silent, instantaneous, flawless communication is maybe best utilized in combat.

Anyway, you can also use it to just straight up mess with people in a tavern. Start giving people signs that they need to embark immediately on a quest, maybe eat the chicken fingers they left on their table.

While it's not a build around the Feat, I do have an Aberrant Mind Sorcerer who telepathically communicates with his parasitic twin. (It's a class feature, but it's functions similarly, without the detect thoughts/day rider.)

[Corey]

The obvious fit is wildshape-friendly Druid (Moon or otherwise).

The scouting potential is immense, and reporting back to allies on what is found does not require leaving wildshape.

Even being "caught" trying to Detect somebody's Thoughts need not lead to a capture/fight scenario.

Since realizing this, I really want to play a Druid. Probably Moon, as my character concepts work great with the weirdness of being a meleer for a few levels, but much more of a caster and utility character after that.

Or shepherd, of course, that but requires a table that likes minionmancy.

[Abracadangit]

It's a shame that they double-nerfed how telepathy usually works (i.e. in other class ability instances, it can communicate regardless of language and/or allows for two-way communication). I almost wished they left telepathy alone and then nerfed Detect Thoughts instead, so it would be on all the time for surface thoughts but targets could make a save to resist.

However, there ARE some neat tricks one could do, based on the ambiguity of the description and how cool your DM is. For example, if you coupled this with the Actor feat and/or Assassin abilities, could you telepathically utter in someone else's voice? There's nothing in the description that says the target necessarily knows where the voice is coming from. If your passage is blocked by two guards, could you steal the voice of one of them and psi-utter in the other one's mind all kinds of insults and nastiness, and get the two to fight each other? If you whisper in someone's mind in a language they DON'T understand, could you convince them they are mad, or possessed, or cursed?

But if we're talking about builds/character ideas, I had a DM once that ruled that if you cast Detect Thoughts on an enemy midcombat as a reaction, barring certain special circumstances, you could find out what their next move was going to be, since it's a surface thought, right? Once per day is hard for this, but I've always thought a sort of "mindspy" would be cool, dodging enemies' incoming attacks by reading their thoughts to always be one step ahead. There was something like that as a prestige class in 3.5e, it might even have been called "mindspy."

[JackPhoenix]

I think the fortune teller idea doesn't work. Detect Thought only allows you to read surface thoughts undetected. Trying to probe for secrets would reveal what you're doing.

[Greywander]

I think the fortune teller idea doesn't work. Detect Thought only allows you to read surface thoughts undetected. Trying to probe for secrets would reveal what you're doing.

On the contrary, this is how real life fortune tellers and similar charlatans work in real life, except instead of reading your surface thoughts they're limited to reading body language. And they still make it work. All you need to do is say something that will get the other person to think about something, e.g. "I see someone, someone dear to you who left you recently..." and then the person will think about who you might be talking about, in so doing bringing to their surface thoughts all the people who might fit what you're describing to them. "Your grandfather who passed away... of a bee sting. A fatal allergy, yes. You miss him greatly, do you not?" And so on. You start to say something, pause, and read their surface thoughts as they try to guess what you're about to say, then finish your sentence using the information you gleaned from their mind.

[Kuulvheysoon]

Yeah, cold readings will fool most believers, and you've got an edge if you can read their surface thoughts.

Maybe even combine it with proficiency (Expertise?) in Insight to help you out if your DM determines that cold reads are a function of Insight (I probably would).

[Guy Lombard-O]

I have a goblin Trickery cleric I'm playing now, who very much wants to pick up telepathy from either the feat or Aberrant Mind sorcerer. I think it'd work quite nicely with Invoke Duplicity and the Hide (bonus) action, to let me better use ID in non-combat situations.

[Amechra]

An Astral Self Monk, with all of your ki powers being refluffed as different psychic powers. This pairs pretty well with the Telekinetic feat, if you want to go deep on the theme.