William Brandes Stoddard
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Alternative Keen Mind and Observant Feats
🕑 Added 2024-08-20 02:13:07 +0000 UTCOver in Tribality, I’ve posted some initial thoughts on the 2024 Player’s Handbook revised rules. If you haven’t already seen that article, here’s the short version: I like a lot of things, but dislike a substantial number of changes too. Today I’m talking in more detail about the Keen Mind and Observant feats – what they were, what they are, what they might yet be.
Keen Mind (2014)
You have a mind that can track time, direction, and detail with uncanny precision. You gain the following benefits.
· Increase your Intelligence score by 1, to a maximum of 20.
· You always know which way is north.
· You always know the number of hours left before the next sunrise or sunset.
· You can accurately recall anything you have seen or heard within the past month.
This is generally one of the lower-power feats. It’s +1 Int, two ribbons, and one very difficult-to-implement feature that is a ribbon in some games and very powerful in others. Knowing which was is north and the time of day are nice to have and harmless to gameplay in most circumstances. If you’re specifically in a maze or other scenario that is about disorientation (including old-school Gygaxian teleportation traps), well, this could put a stop to that.
For the last bullet point, if the player doesn’t remember, that’s putting a lot of mental burden on the GM to remind the player accurately, or it stops play for a conversation as the player(s) and GM negotiate canon-going-forward. If you’re playing a spy of almost any kind, walking through a crowded room to pick up and replay potentially many different conversations could be an incredible character moment. Not game-breaking in most games, but some extra work for the GM.
Keen Mind (2024)
General Feat (Prerequisite: Level 4+, Intelligence 13+)
You gain the following benefits.
Ability Score Increase. Increase your Intelligence score by 1, to a maximum of 20.
Lore Knowledge. Choose one of the following skills: Arcana, History, Investigation, Nature, or Religion. If you lack proficiency with the chosen skill, you gain proficiency in it, and if you already have proficiency in it, you gain Expertise in it.
Quick Study. You can take the Study action as a Bonus Action.
So, first problem, right out the gate: both Keen Mind and Observant compare not-very-favorably to Skill Expert. The Int prereq is the first problem—this one wants you to be good in order to get better, while Skill Expert has no such compunction. Second problem (as I described in the Tribality article), if there’s a feat that grants an improvement to the action economy of the Study action, the GM can’t reduce that action economy for anyone else, or they’re undermining the benefit of the feat. This is the part that I think is actually bad for the game. It teaches an outlook on information that gets in the way of the action.
There are times when information should take time. You know, when you need to skim through a book in the middle of a fight or recognize an illusion for what it is. I’ll freely grant that Studying an illusion to make an Int (Investigation) check against it, as we see in Phantasmal Force, is a meaningful use case for a Study action that can only be cut down to a Bonus Action with a feat, and not by GM generosity. Still, the majority of the time Study comes up, you’re in narrative time rather than combat time, so this part of the feature doesn’t do anything.
Keen Mind (Alternate)
General Feat (Prerequisite: Level 4+)
You gain the following benefits.
· Ability Score Increase. Increase your Intelligence score by 1, to a maximum of 20. If your Intelligence score is already 20, increase your Wisdom score by 1. (If your Int and Wis are 20, you don’t need any more help.)
· Lore Knowledge. Choose one of the following skills: Arcana, History, Investigation, Nature, or Religion. If you lack proficiency with the chosen skill, you gain proficiency in it, and if you already have proficiency in it, you gain Expertise in it.
· Unravel Influence. When you roll a Wisdom or Charisma saving throw to avoid or end the Charmed condition, you can use your Intelligence modifier instead.
· Quick Wits. When you roll initiative, you can use your Intelligence modifier instead of your Dexterity modifier.
It’s worth saying that this has the effect—good, bad, or both—of rewarding an Int score of 13+ more than either other version.
Observant (2014)
Quick to notice details of your environment, you gain the following benefits:
· Increase your Intelligence or Wisdom score by 1, to a maximum of 20.
· If you can see a creature's mouth while it is speaking a language you understand, you can interpret what it's saying by reading its lips.
· You have a +5 bonus to your passive Wisdom (Perception) and passive Intelligence (Investigation) scores.
This is generally an underestimated feat, because the use of passive Perception is unpredictable, and this is one of the only official mentions of passive Investigation as far as I know; there’s very little guidance on how you’d even use it. Does it detect illusions? Maybe it should? Anyway, +5 to passive Perception is incredible for some things, like detecting secret doors – with a half-decent Wis and proficiency or expertise in Perception, you can push your passive Perception high enough to notice every secret door and absolutely crush the Tomb of Annihilation.
Dungeon design tip: When you think you’re done, go back in and add 1d4 more secrets for the players to discover. Secret doors, secret compartments, secret messages—doesn’t matter as much as having secrets in the first place.
Lip-reading is a ribbon feature in most games, though players who bought the feat and get a character moment out of that bullet point are typically really excited about it. To me, “rare, but when it happens it feels great!” is a solid rubric for justifying a ribbon’s existence.
Observant (2024)
General Feat (Prerequisite: Level 4+, Intelligence or Wisdom 13+)
You gain the following benefits.
Ability Score Increase. Increase your Intelligence or Wisdom score by 1, to a maximum of 20.
Keen Observer. Choose one of the following skills: Insight, Investigation, or Perception. If you lack proficiency with the chosen skill, you gain proficiency in it, and if you already have proficiency in it, you gain Expertise in it.
Quick Search. You can take the Search action as a Bonus Action.
At least needing one of two different stats to be 13+ fits into more stat arrangements than one specific stat being 13+. Needing to be good to get better is still a solution in search of a problem, though. As mentioned above, this compares unfavorably to Skill Expert, until and unless Searching in combat is something you’re doing regularly.
Monster design note: It probably won’t be, unless WotC pivots to creating a bunch of monsters that resemble 4e Lurkers. I wish they would, though—4e Lurkers are fun to fight because they’re dangerous, but highly vulnerable to defenders and controllers.
Quick Search has some of the same problems as Quick Study. The unmodified Search action being an action means that whatever you learn, you need to wait until your next turn to act on it meaningfully. Taking it down to a Bonus Action means that the GM can’t reduce the action cost without undermining the feat (but most Searching is still outside of combat, so Quick Search is no help). Having to pay a feat to fix the Search action to be combat-useful feels bad. It’s not like your class and subclass don’t already want your Bonus Actions for something else, for most classes.
Observant (Alternate)
General Feat (Prerequisite: Level 4+)
From an excellent sense for detail in all that you perceive, you gain the following benefits.
Ability Score Increase. Increase your Intelligence or Wisdom score by 1, to a maximum of 20.
Keen Observer. Choose one of the following skills: Insight, Investigation, or Perception. If you lack proficiency with the chosen skill, you gain proficiency in it, and if you already have proficiency in it, you gain Expertise in it.
Unravel Illusion. When you Study something to recognize it as an illusion, you have advantage on your Intelligence (Investigation) check, and you can use your Wisdom modifier in place of your Intelligence modifier.
It seems to me that being Observant should help more than having a Keen Mind for noticing flaws in the illusion. Observant helping you with Investigation and Search but not Study, one of the main reasons you’d actually roll Investigation in combat, seems kind of… off, to me.
Conclusion
Keen Mind and Observant are incredibly dry and mostly worse than Skill Expert, as presented, and the mechanics lack a satisfying connection to narrative for me. I miss having some definite statements of minor things you can accomplish without a check. But then, I liked the Background Features that gave you social things you could accomplish without a roll.
