Monstrous Compendium Vol. 1: Spelljammer Creatures
Frozen Sick
D&D Beyond Basic Rules
Basic Rules (2014)
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Monstrous Compendium Vol. 1: Spelljammer CreaturesFrozen SickD&D Beyond Basic RulesBasic Rules (2014)Sign in to view your library & saved favorites.
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The Telepathy Feat states you can communicate with any creature within 60 feet that you can see. It then states that "the creature" must understand the language. Does this imply that you can only communicate with one creature at a time? If you can broadcast the message to multiple people, does that allow you to choose a list of recipients from the group of creatures you can see OR do all creatures you can see within 60 feet "hear" the telepathic message? Contrasting with detect thoughts, which states you can read the thoughts of "any one creature", seems to indicate this feat is meant for multiple targets?
I'd say "any creature" is different from "any creatures" and so the ability sounds like you can use the feature with one creature at a time. Especially considering the later text that you point out.
It does what the words on the page make it sound like it does (unlike what some people might have you believe). You talk to any creature (singular) and it (singular) understands you if it knows that language.
It is one creature at a time, but you're not locked into just that one creature for a duration, as such by the spell telepathy or some of its variants. You can bounce it around to different creatures pretty willy-nilly and communicate with them, but only individually.
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Is the telepathy in your own distinct voice in the other persons head, or can you change how the other person hears you in their head?
The Telepathy rules don't elaborate on that so it would be up to DM.
Nowhere in the rules does it say they "hear" you. There's no aural component to it. A creature is contacted, and mental communication happens. So there's no 'hearing' and no 'voice'.
If a mutual language is required, the message is going to be understood through words somehow. Some forms of telepathy don't require a shared language, so presumably that kind of telepathy invokes images and/or emotions directly.
Which isn't to say that different telepaths couldn't have different styles, but it's not going to be a matter of how they "sound". (Certainly telepathic contact is not going to be at all like hearing someone speak normally. The larynx is at no point involved. So you won't be able to identify the sender based on their speaking voice.)
At my table we run it more like thoughts in your head than actual voice.
With what's been noted, I'd like to point out: Whether you hear it as the person's voice or not, as a form of communication, it's clearly something external when heard/experienced.
Just to address a point that sometimes comes up with regards to what telepathy "sounds like"- RAW all basic telepathic communication does is put words in someone's head. There's no inherent ability to do this in such a way that the subject will consider the words to be their own thoughts and thus be influenced by them. I won't categorically rule out a "can I try this" moment, but it's up to the DM to decide if a character will roll with it, require a skill check, or simply not be convinced. Really, I'm not sure there's any player-facing or even explicit DM facing method to try this.
Oh, I wasn't suggesting you could pretend to be the person talking to themself. But you could pretend to be someone else in the vicinity, because they'd have no idea who was communicating with them unless the person identified themself.
Wasn't aimed at you, just a response to the post that revived this thread.