PROPOSAL: Allow Non-Kalashtar to "initiate" the conversation...

Kalidrev said:

Speech is a free action that can be done as much as one wants to, though DMs usually restrict dialog mid-combat to something pretty short (realistically, how much can one say in 6 seconds?). I completely agree with the idea that it should be one-on-one at any given time, but I do not see why this should mean that a short message (less than 2 or 3 seconds long) could not be relayed to one or two other PCs in that same round.
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This brings up an interesting point as well. Our minds can process information fairly quickly right? There's probably a delay when our brain has to transmit to our mouths then through the air then the message has to be decoded by the receiver and transmitted to their brain, if someone can transmit the message directly into another creatures brain (in its language) would that actually allow for more "talking" than true speech?

renau1g said:

This brings up an interesting point as well. Our minds can process information fairly quickly right? There's probably a delay when our brain has to transmit to our mouths then through the air then the message has to be decoded by the receiver and transmitted to their brain, if someone can transmit the message directly into another creatures brain (in its language) would that actually allow for more "talking" than true speech?

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In real life, doubtful (anything is possible in an RPG).

Our brains tend to be wired to work one way well and unusual ways not so well. For example, if someone talks extremely fast in real life, a lot of people just stand there and go "Huh?". It's not that they cannot hear and understand the faster speech, it's that their brain is not used to processing it faster and would get confused.

As a different example, Kim Peek just died this week. His brain could process a lot different than nearly everyone else's brain because of how it was wired. But just because he could read two pages, one with one eye and one with the other, does not mean that nearly anyone else can do so.

KarinsDad said:

In real life, doubtful (anything is possible in an RPG).

Our brains tend to be wired to work one way well and unusual ways not so well. For example, if someone talks extremely fast in real life, a lot of people just stand there and go "Huh?". It's not that they cannot hear and understand the faster speech, it's that their brain is not used to processing it faster and would get confused.

As a different example, Kim Peek just died this week. His brain could process a lot different than nearly everyone else's brain because of how it was wired. But just because he could read two pages, one with one eye and one with the other, does not mean that nearly anyone else can do so.

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I agree with this completely, KD. And it would be my interpretation of exactly this kind of brain wiring that would allow a Kalashtar to be able to process sound and telepathic messages at the same time.

EDIT: of course... that may not necessarily be true either. In your example, Kim Peek is a human, and so are we, so maybe not every Kalashtar could process both sound and telepathy. *shrug* Something for a feat addition or DM interp I guess.

KarinsDad said:

elecgraystone has brought up a humorous point.



Val will pay for this decision. Drow don't sleep at night. Call Sheeva flighty behind her back, will ya?

"96 bottles of ale on the wall, 96 bottles of ale..."

All night long. And nobody else in the group will ever hear it. Mwa ha ha ha ha.


Be careful what you wish for.

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Careful, he's only forced to hear allies

CaBaNa said:

Careful, he's only forced to hear allies

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Nope! It only has to be 'a creature with a language'. Hehehe That means Ts'iri's familiar could torment someone all night while I sleep!

I was running a genie-heavy 3e game, which meant a lot of telepathy. 3e telepathy rules were similarly light. A few puzzlers came up. Like for example, could a genie walk into a room, not see anyone, and telepathically call out "Is anyone here?" Would a hidden character "hear" that? Could the genie choose between individually targeted telepathy and broadcasts to a group? Could a non-telepathic character, faced with two genies, "talk" telepathically to one and not the other? (I tended to finesse these sort of things when they came up at the table, choosing whatever was the most fun.)

In the end, I think treating telepathy as a universal language, as elecgraystone has suggested here, is a pretty good solution. Basically when the kalashtar speaks, anyone who can hear him can understand what he is saying, and when the kalashtar hears anyone speaking, he can understand them no matter what language they speak. That way of playing actually seems to be consistent with the rules as they are written - nowhere does it say that telepathy is silent, does it? (Admittedly playing this way would make Group Mind much less useful - a shared universal translator function is not nearly as good as a private radio channel.)

This probably isn't a practical solution to the proposal at hand, since it's so very different than the way people have been playing it so far, it would be a pretty jarring change. For the proposal at hand, I don't really see much possibility of a universal solution. I think it'd just be best to leave it as DM choice (made in consultation with the players as always). That leaves the prospect of a player considering a kalashtar not knowing exactly how things will work, which is not ideal, but in this case, any "nerfing" or "buffing" created by different interpretations seems very minor, and quite tolerable IMHO.

I see no problem with this proposal. After all, even if someone is against it, the kalashtar player could say: Every time one of my allies is within range I "dial" his number and keep the line open, loosely using the cellphone example from other posts.

I would, however, only allow him to hear one ally per round.

A combat example of this could be:

Situation: Everyone spams info on a round of combat to the telepath.
Telepath: "Shut up everyone! I'm trying to hear what Fighter is saying."

IMO the feat is needed in order to use telepathy to speak freely between multiple beings, otherwise it should be only 1 on 1 for "hearing" and 1 on all when the telepath is speaking.