Telepathic Feat 5E Guide | Pros, Cons, and Potential Builds

Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything is here to vastly increase your brain, with the telepathic feat. When you become a telepath, you can connect your brain to others around you. This does not stop at simple messages; this is a way to quite literally read others’ minds. If your character wants to read thoughts, and communicate in a brand new way, our Telepathic 5E guide will show you if it’s worthwhile.

Telepathic Feat 5E Guide

Telepathic increases one mental stat (Intelligence, Wisdom, or Charisma) of your choice by 1. You can speak telepathically with a creature within 60 feet, without any method for the creature to respond, and your telepathy is in a language you know. You also learn Detect Thoughts, and can cast it once per day for free.

Pros

Telepathic doesn’t completely throw away your Ability Score increase, which is great. You can keep increasing your mental stats while getting additional benefits. If your Wisdom was at 13, for example, you can get it to 14 (which has the same mechanical benefits as 15!).

Telepathy is pretty solid, it lets you talk to your party or allies without anyone else even having a chance of knowing. You can only get countered by someone with even stronger telepathy. This’ll also let you communicate while in Silence, which is great! Or you can use Deception to convince a weak-minded target that a god is talking to them (or something).

Detect Thoughts is a pretty cool spell. It can let you find invisible targets, learn more information, and is a perfect counter to otherwise believable liars. You get to cast it once per day for free, and you otherwise learn it, so you’ve got a good out-of-combat spell for yourself! And if you ever want to interrogate a target, then you have the perfect spell to mess with their lying strategy.

Cons

The telepathy is awful. The target can’t communicate back to you, and you can’t use it to overcome language barriers. So you’re losing some of the most essential reasons to even use Telepathy. All you can do is direct, which isn’t bad… But it isn’t great, sometimes the spells will just do better and let you overcome the obstacles you’d overcome with this feat much better.

Detect Thoughts is a pretty good spell, but how often do you really need to interrogate someone? Usually there will be other ways to convince them to talk, and if you’re found out then you might get targeted for trying to use magic to influence them.

Potential Builds

Telepathy, as limited as it is, does make for a good leader build. If you’re the one making decisions for your party and giving them information on the fly, it’s a good idea! A Bard, for instance, with Expertise in Deception, can make particularly good use of this, or a Rogue.

Alternatively, this can be useful in giving specific classes Detect Thoughts. A Paladin, for instance, might want the ability to read minds to find heretics. Or, maybe an Eldritch Knight wishes to know the whims of those around them, and has the Intimidation to back up their interrogation.

Conclusions

Telepath is a pretty weak feat. The telepathy is pretty useless, and Detect Thoughts, while good, is situational. Still, if you’re wanting to get great use out of briefly invading minds, this is a fun choice! Consider it if your DM has fun rules around feats, or if you’re just wanting that one extra point in a mental stat and want to be better at interrogation. See our Feats 5E Guide for more ideas.