read thoughts / telepathy & mindsight feat

[emanresu]

I'm playing a Beguiler 8th, and took a dip into mindbender gaining me at will telepathy. I also picked up the mindsight feat...Ok so during a campaign I was looking up read thoughts and noticed the 1st 2 rounds were wasted because I already know where all int minds are and what there int score was...does telepathy expedite read thoughts because of this?

eman

 

[RUMBLETiGER]

The two abilities do separate things. Telepathy does not allow you to read surface thoughts, only the words the other person intentionally tries to project to you. I have no reason to believe that Telepathic ability has any affect mechanically on the number of rounds it takes for Detect Thoughts to "warm up" as it were.

However, if a DM wanted to rule in favor of this, good times. See if you can work it out.

 

[emanresu]

telepathy effect on read thoughts

heres the detect thoughts as written............

1st Round

Presence or absence of thoughts (from conscious creatures with Intelligence scores of 1 or higher).

2nd Round

Number of thinking minds and the Intelligence score of each. If the highest Intelligence is 26 or higher (and at least 10 points higher than your own Intelligence score), you are stunned for 1 round and the spell ends. This spell does not let you determine the location of the thinking minds if you can’t see the creatures whose thoughts you are detecting.

3rd Round

Surface thoughts of any mind in the area. A target’s Will save prevents you from reading its thoughts, and you must cast detect thoughts again to have another chance. Creatures of animal intelligence (Int 1 or 2) have simple, instinctual thoughts that you can pick up.

Each round, you can turn to detect thoughts in a new area. The spell can penetrate barriers, but 1 foot of stone, 1 inch of common metal, a thin sheet of lead, or 3 feet of wood or dirt blocks it.


Telepathy + mindsight combo, not only already has this auto done in a 100' radius, it also gives me the local of each and basic info like the race n gender etc of each. This is the reason why I thought telepathy would expedite the detect thoughts sequence, 1 2 n 3, and skip 1 n 2 and go straight to #3 reading the surface thoughts.

How would you DMs rule on this if presented by a player?

Eman

 

[Ahnehnois]

As written, the two abilities are redundant and I see no basis for expediting the read thoughts progression.

However, I think it would be an entirely reasonable to houserule this sort of synergistic benefit in. If I were writing a new set of abilities from scratch, it would make sense to stack them together in this way. That wasn't done in this case because they are from disparate sources and because WotC was fairly conservative about this sort of thing (though they started writing in various combo type things in late 3.5 releases). But it would be a nice incentive to pile up as many telepathic abilities as possible.

 

[emanresu]

thanks thats what I was looking for, more of your opinion, whats logical, what would your group say? So often we have to think outside the box, just simply repeating the rules doesn't settle a situation, improvisation is needed.

eman

 

[Ahnehnois]

It makes sense, and I don't think the end result is disparate from the RAI for the underlying abilities, nor is it likely to present a balance issue. The two-round waiting period is not such an important thing that forgoing it will break the game.

 

[emanresu]

I accidentally stumbled upon this in game play. The DM ruled since I had a class prestige class (MB) and a feat (mindsight) invested into this I should be better than most at casting read/detect thoughts. He ruled straight to #3 having the 1st and 2nd step already accomplished.

I was just wondering what you all thought and would do in own game

Eman