@NautArch note that after question modification for topicality, this answer doesn't really make too much sense any more.

@Ben CRUNCH

@MikeQ You arrive on "The Uninhabited Island", and are immediately met by the locals, offering food and lodging. You then realise that the use of the inverted commas was not actually misplaced, and is akin to "The Incredibly Deadly Viper"

@Ben \o/!!!

@nitsua60 I did comment on it asking why they couldn't simply add the property to the creature's attacks, but then I realised the Adventurers League “certified” part.

@nitsua60 thank you! Is there a way Answer writers can get notifications to questions?

@NautArch star the question :)

hey guys

howdy shal

are dragons in dnd (5e) generally the monogamous sort, kind of has big implications for my character given his backstory

@Skyler I wouldn't be surprised if they were, it'd fit with the expected reproductive strategy of an intelligent, long-lived species. however, I would be equally as unsurprised if they weren't. really depends on how hard it is to raise a brood of wyrmlings ;)

watches a wyrmling curl up in @Skyler's lap

@Shalvenay Wyrmling mortality, superfecundicity, probably other things....

@nitsua60 that too :)

@Shalvenay I've tried and never gotten a notification

@NautArch dunno then

Oh yay. BSOD.

@NautArch someone called KeBugCheckEx()?

Hey all. I never chose an answer for this question. Anyone have suggestions between the two possible answers?

They both have very strong points. But almost contradict each other and yet both are correct.

@NautArch Not that I know of.

Accept the answer that helps you the most.

Let voting take care of the rest.

(If no answer has helped you, don't feel pressure to accept one anyway.)

^^

@Shalvenay holla! :)

@nitsua60 presumably, tag-that-shall-not-be-named is either Hastur (unlikely) or FATAL (likely).

In my experience it's either rules-as-written or game-recommendations, with runners-up including vow-of-poverty, monk, and alignment.

monk-as-intended vow-of-recommendations rules-alignment

rules-as-recommended alignment-of-games monk-writing

Dnd 5e. I was reading on d&dbeyond

For example, a key is hidden beneath a set of folded clothes in the top drawer of a bureau. If you tell the DM that you pace around the room, looking at the walls and furniture for clues, you have no chance of finding the key, regardless of your Wisdom (Perception) check result. You would have to specify that you were opening the drawers or searching the bureau in order to have any chance of success.

@Magician lol, this is fantastic

Wouldn't a wisdom check be used in a case like this to say "it seems dresser drawers would be a great place to hide a key"

@Acts7Seven It could be. This highlights a fundamental difference in approaches: character skill vs player skill.

@Magician how do you mean? (I've only been GM ing for 6 or so weeks)

Old School games, which 5e tries to be inspired by, value player skill more, i.e. it's on the player to overcome the challenge by figuring out where the hidden key may be.

See also Paradigms of Play by yours truly. Basically, player describing where they look is the Ingenuity paradigm, while player rolling Wisdom to figure out where to look is the Mastery paradigm.

This is where I'd say, if you're going to play a game where you need to find clues in order to continue, use Gumshoe conceits: if you narrate using the right skill in the right scene, you find at least the minimum needed to move forward.

(I think that's called the "don't let your game stop cold for silly reasons" paradigm.)

DLYGSCFSR, as it is colloquially known.

@fectin In that conversation it was rules-as-written.

This is relephant to my interests.

@BESW ar ar ar ar

I was asked recently to explain to someone who considers themself a "newbie GM" and isn't very confident in their game creation skills a fateful question.

it spelled "How do you prepare a plot for a game? Is there a technique that I can use?"

Apart from the usual "Don't prepare plots, prepare situations and actors" I said "Yes, there are techniques, but which you use is dependent on what type of game you have. Investigation? Dungeon crawl? Social drama? Horror? What game do you want?"

Boy it did not go down well.

@eimyr In my little GM experience I think that "don't prepare plots" doesn't work, until you let your players do the things.

I think it's like a swimming. You don't believe that a water can hold you, until you let it. And so with plots. You're afraid of players and railroad them, until you let them do the things they want to and combine things that you wanted to do with it.

@doppelgreener this is cute :)

@eimyr "Spend many hours writing pages and pages of notes on setting, characters, and plots. Throw them out 30 minutes into the game because the players have gone completely off the grid."

@eimyr Newbie GMs often are incapable of answering questions like that, because they don't even know enough to understand the question fully. Type of game? What, there's more than one? It takes some experience to even understand those things.

@doppelgreener This is where active listening can be a really useful skill.

@RollingFeles It is like swimming, but there is the classical style and crawl and butterfly... not all swimming has to be freeform flailing.

@BESW I'm a huge fan of zero-waste prep

There's nothing to waste because you throw it all out. Yes.

@doppelgreener Experience, sure, but you can also bring some theory into it. The way I like to explain it is with movies.

You have your adventure movies and you have your thrillers and rom-coms. pick one, go to step two.

step two is to identify what is important in the type of movie you want, so adventure movies have chases and fights and cool planning montages. rom coms have awkward conversations, juicy developed characters... etc. etc

That's all reasonable, but having seen at least a few movies ourselves, we can gather how movies can possibly have genres, and how genres can possibly have more than one type of movie each.

People coming into the hobby for the first time are often seeing D&D or tabletop roleplaying in general as one single cohesive uniform activity without variation. It's "let's pay chess" (chess doesn't have genres) not "let's play a board game"

@doppelgreener If you're unaware of game genres then you have been hurt by games you've played so far.

If someone tells me right now chess does actually have genres (because they understand chess well enough to understand that) my mind will be blown and I will be struggling as much as someone being told D&D has more than one type of play.

@eimyr Hey, I'm mentioning this since you said that line of questioning did not go down well. (The turn of phrase you used suggests quite spectacularly so.)

D&D and some other rpg behemoths have a way of grooming players to only respond to their specific cues and recognise them as rpgs

@eimyr Yes, I agree with that.

@doppelgreener I'm using a turn of phrase to address a hypothetical newbie GM you, not you-greener specifically.

@doppelgreener there are chess puzzles and quick play, and tournament play and simultaneous chess and...

What I am saying though is the line of questioning you mentioned giving them often does not go down well with newbie GMs. It is entirely normal for that line of questioning to go nowhere useful, because it uses concepts they do not understand, and they are not equipped to begin to understand it.

@doppelgreener HOWEVER, this particualr GM comes from an evironment where various games are being played

so the objection is not to the existence of different RPG genres, but rather that it matters

Yeah, that's part of them not even being equipped to understand it.

it's not "what? horror games? you mean, that the monsters in the dungeon are scary?" but rather "what do you mean I can't play a social drama using plots lifted from sword and sorcery?"

it's a bit like a person learning a new language taking their native sentences and translating every word separately

You have, however, explored the differences, been able to take time to learn to them, been introduced to them, and have directly experienced how and why it can matter.

You understand, and have been equipped to understand. None of that is true for them, or they have not really understood and appreciated what you've noticed and thoroughly taken on board.

the result is perhaps somewhat coherent, maybe even useful, but still poor

A person can watch several action movies and feel like they're all the same, and be sitting with a friend watching all of them who considers them to be radically different -- because said friend is equipped with the mental tools to understand them, parse them apart, recognise and articulate their distinguishing features, introspect as to the differences they create in the audience, etc.

@BESW Yay! Dragons!

@doppelgreener sure, that's not challenged by anyone I believe.

how to get around that though?

you see, I'd say that a person who asks "how can I write a plot?" and gets a response along the lines of "first, spend 5 years reading articles and slowly improving your terrible games..."

@eimyr with a lot of baby steps, starting with the smaller basic concepts, and accepting they're not ready to see more subtle differences yet (where "more subtle differences" is "anything not blindingly obvious") as they iteratively understand a little bit more over time. It's not the kind of thing that gets resolved in a single conversation, and that first conversation has to be made with acceptance that they simply will not understand most of the concepts at play yet; they're not ready to.

work out what they do understand -- which involves active listening, as BESW mentioned -- and figure out the landscape with which you can work to explain to them what they can practically work with.

@BESW hehehehe

"Ah, well. That's a tall order, there's no one-size-fits-all solution. I usually default to [style] but it definitely doesn't work in [situation] because [incompatibility]."

@BESW [grumble grumble] you're not helpful, I'm discouraged now.

that's just about how it went

"I know, it's kind of overwhelming and it feels better to have a structure to plug into, but I've never found a universal answer. I'd be happy to help more when you've got more particulars to work with, or I could tell you about the different techniques I've used and their strengths and weaknesses."

I think the challenge for me is to provide some help that's immediately useful

That's why I offered "I usually use [style]" pretty early on in the mockversation.

that the other person can use and gain from the exchange without putting more effort than they are comfortable with

@BESW Perhaps that's the source of my failure. My usual "style" is highly analytical and heavy on theorycraft, which sounds more pompous and foreign than it needs to.

Ah, yes. That might do it.

Whereas my current style is more along the lines of "write down some descriptions of cool places, the motives of the important NPCs, some interesting things that might happen, and practice funny voices."

so, literally, my Step One is "identify genre and spell out the 3-5 main foci of the genre. Identify the main story loop and decide what aspect of prep you need to focus on. What drives the play - locations, events, npcs, challenges?"

@BESW I struggle to do coherent prep this way. I'd be willing to admit that after a long-winded theory session my prep can result in doing exactly what you are doing, but I can't manage until I have the game deconstructed in my head to basic narrative parts.

I guess I'm just much less intuitive than you when it comes to prep.

Oh, that's game prep.

well, game creation

not necessarily session prep

I was talking about prep for a part of a game, like an adventure.

Full campaigns aren't usually the same as a plot for me, not anymore.

ahh, I was talking about devising some overarching plot/main points and features of a game

as in, a self contained campaign

though admittedly a "campaign" is "more than 6 sessions" to me

I mean, back when I was doing D&D campaigns, I'd usually spend between one and three months designing a campaign and then run it for four to eight months.

I'd have the full setting overview and a lot of details worked out, the major beats of the plot that we'd hit, the finale... each week I'd fill in details for whatever was going to happen next time, but it was almost always coloring inside the lines of a pretty firm framework.

I did this mostly because the first campaign I ran, I'd spent waaaay too much time on exactly what I thought would happen and nothing else, so when the PCs turned the wrong way I had to improvise everything.

@BESW Even ten years ago I had a ballistic approach, where I would set up a situation, load it, fire and only very vaguely plan what happens mid-flight

It still resulted in some prep losses

These days I prefer to build robust tools that allow for semi-improvisation.

Ten years ago I was just starting to lean into the idea of setting up a world full of NPCs with motives and agendas, and then letting the PCs barrel through like a bowling ball through a game of chess.

But that meant I needed the whole world prepped upfront: I didn't need a plot planned, but I needed the current state of the setting in some fine detail.

@BESW Currently I just prepare a few pieces of content (which I'll reskin as necessary) and my general palette for adventure & location flavour, and have a loose plan for the kinds of events that will probably happen, and try to fly by the seat of my pants during the session according to what the players are doing.

My most successful session (the BRAC base infiltration & rescue of Charles Babbage) was that, my least successful (the singular velociraptor twin in a giant robot) involved too much expectation of what specifically should happen and it made a lot of player choices meaningless.

I tend to prepare things that are NOT important to the genre. So, say, if I'm running a social drama, an NPC having a life-threatening accident is just a floating idea of a thing that can happen, without a prescribed order, details or even an NPC/PC it affects. It's there for me to use when it seems like a good idea (with some triggers, e.g. nothing bad happened for a while), and it's not important to the genre - it's about how characters react rather than specific accident.

And even then, I was often designing the setting so that no matter what string the PCs tugged, it always led back to a particular central place/character/event.

I'm very happy with that approach so far.

I haven't really properly planned a game from scratch in... gosh, maybe a year or more?

I'm either using pre-mades or almost completely winging it.

I've come to like starting adventures with a planned scene because it's the only bit I can be sure of having much control over.

But I'm super seat of the pants lately. No energy for complex prep beyond "There's this guy who wants your help with a thing and he's got this funny voice."

@BESW Yeah, I do that in investigation/mystery type games where secrets and pursuit of information is the main focus

(In my GM style, funny voices are the cornerstone of good games.)

I practically killed Trogdor with my bored librarian in our Cthulhu Confidential game.

@BESW All my character have thick Eastern European accent and a reasonably highly pitched male voice. Don't know why.

@eimyr Is it because that's your voice?

@SPavel it's just on loan actually

@doppelgreener loan is artifact of corrupt plutocrat system

in glorious paradise of soviet union, all things belong to the people

@SPavel what are those "things" you talk about, comrade Pavel?

@eimyr what are, like, things, man?

a "thing" is whatever an adventurer can smash

@doppelgreener There is no limit to what an adventurer cannot smash

@SPavel My adventurer cannot smash many things

@NautArch Your adventurer may not be an adventurer

@doppelgreener You said it in a humorous manner, but the idea that an in-game phenomenon is only as significant as it's ludonarrative function in relation to a player may sound hoighty-toity but is pretty darn fundamental and difficult to grasp for many GMs

I wish I had a gift to reduce such concepts to such easily intuited examples.

@SPavel ohnoes

@eimyr If you don't use words like ludonarrative, then it doesn't sound hoity-toity at all

Agreed

@SPavel what to use instead?

Things are only important if the player can do something with them.

@eimyr TV Tropes links

like tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/…

is shot

dang, I need to spend $180 to have access via DNDbeyond for the physical books i already have :(

@NautArch Yup. It's pretty darn unfortunate.

@Adam Wish there was a way to put in serial numbers for a discount or something. But that's the digital life. Much like my current frustration of having bought some movies on Google PLay that I can not watch on my FIreTV because of the Amazon/Google war.

Lots of people want that. I want that. But alas, The Devs and WotC have both already said no to that multiple times.

I would actually use the tool for more than just a magic item index if I didn't need to double my investment.

@NautArch Read some Cory Doctorow, he will motivate you to join the anti-DRM revolution

Then you will become a cool and handsome hacker

@NautArch +1 for locate object in this answer. In our exciting finish to Curse of Strahd that spell, cast on "Strahd's clothes" came in super-useful.

@nitsua60 Until you realize that Strahd is a vampire, vampires are very vain, and the entire castle is full of wardrobes stuffed with frilly doublets

@SPavel DRM isn't necessarily the problem, it's the pricing scheme I'm hearing NautArch rail against.

@nitsua60 I mean the Google/Amazon stuff

Ah--nvm.

@nitsua60 Gotta give credit to JAStreich for that

@eimyr you're giving me too much credit :D i just meant that abstract concepts weren't "things" in this case

but all of that is true

(and gosh that sparked a nice discussion)

@doppelgreener Abstract concepts are things too, if we use the smash metric

Have your adventurers never set out to fight evil? Evil is an abstract concept.

Oooh.

And I guess our heroes could SMASH A TOWN'S SADNESS AND DESPAIR by convincing the goblins plaguing their highway to instead become law enforcement

Epic barbarians should be allowed to tear concepts to pieces with their bare hands

I'm on board for that

especially since everything is gods anyway

Barbarian is about to be defeated by a mighty foe, but he shakes a fist in the general direction of Kelemvor, and suddenly the concept of death is suspended

@SPavel or at that stage, he took Kelemvor out for a beer last week and won at arm wrestling and so calls in the favor he's now owed

(it was a close match, and if he'd lost, he would've been on the line to level a kingdom for Kelemvor when he next needs one levelled)

@SPavel Oh, I'm a big fan of Cory and BoingBoing :)

One of my work highlights was getting my product mentioned on BoingBoing by Xeni.

Meanwhile the divine avatar for Kord, god of battle and strength, is arm wrestling with Kord regularly and reliably losing but Kord is always encouraging her and saying how she almost got him that time.

@SPavel reminds me of that episode of family guy where Death sprains his ankle, so nobody could die

(i adore Kord myself and to this day my headcanon for him still has him in a beer hat and cheering on sports and bro-ing it up with anyone who is bro-up-able, which is just about everybody in his afterlife)

Question on the DNDbeyond subscription - is that instead of purchasing the books outright, or is that just give you access to Site Tools and not content?

subscription gives you access to tools and removes ads, but doesn't unlock any content

You can purchase all of the game's content and not subscribe, or subscribe and only use basic rules and homebrew content if you wanted.

gotcha - that's what i thought. I'm surprised there isn't a subscription content plan.

@NautArch bits-and-mortar.com

@eimyr ...and bookmarked!

@Frezak That's brilliant.

@doppelgreener We had to use our powers to knock over as many ... whatever you call 'em as we could. We did all kinds of ridiculous stuff to knock pins( ?) into each other and blast stuff around and extend limbs and basically just be ridiculous.

@Frezak hahah. How did it go? Where's the exciting PBA play-by-play? Did either Ban or Kord pull a Munson?

@Frezak It's from the movie Kingpin

possibly the greatest bowling movie of all time :P

@NautArch We won by a... bowling mile? Whatever unit of distance is used to denote significance in that sport. Kord's champion was... some kind of ape/monkey-man monk acrobat that kept failing. While the sword-Warlock and the Warden just went around exploding (literally in one case). It was actually really fun, even if the DM had to keep stopping to figure out Actual Bowling rules.

Hahaha, that sounds pretty awesome. How did it actually work? Did the stone pillar/pins have an AC you had to hit? Ability checks?

or both?

@Frezak that is super cool and fun sounding!

Yeah, it really was. And we won, which makes it better.

10/10, Would Bowl Again

holy balls I need to work on the brevity of my answers

@Rubiksmoose I often find myself saying that, too. But completeness > Brevity.

@NautArch this might be verging on ridiculousness though

@Rubiksmoose too-broad

@Rubiksmoose Yeah, I think you went down an unnecessary rabbit hole.

I think you can simplify it immensely by just saying No, it's about issuing commands, not about readings minds. Want reading minds? Cast Detect Thoughts.

You have only dominated the creature's motor and verbal skills. It says nothing about reading their thoughts.

@NautArch It's funny because I think the most simple and compelling argument is at the bottom: the 8th vs 5th level spell thing

@Rubiksmoose I respectfully disagree :) I don't think it's related at all. Telepathy is between two willing creatures and says can communicate. It doesn't open the minds immeditaely for all sharing and knowledge. It's a choice by each. DOminate person is an entirely different mechanic.

and it's still based on choice by the creature. Dominate says nothing at all about communications - just control.

How do you do inline tags?

[jeff]

@NautArch Hmm. Maybe I wasn't clear? I am saying that if you allow dominate to include communication it basically makes it a much better telepathy with a much lower spell slot which makes no sense.

:(

awesome

(It doesn't have to be an existing tag, as you just saw. But when it is, it nicely links to the existing tag-page.)

i-promise-not-to-abuse-this-power

helloworld

just-promise-to-use-hypens-in-place-of-spaces

no-promises

sniped

flat-footed

tag-tag_tag_

tag-fail

i-saw-that-edit

i-saw-what-you-did-last-message

@Rubiksmoose AH! Yes, that's a good addendum. But I think you can probably remove most of what you've got and simplify it.

@nitsua60 jeff-is-a-legit-tag

all-hail-jeff-the-queen-of-tags

@nitsua60 i-see-dead-people

@NautArch gonna-need-a-bigger-tag

@NautArch I'm hackin' and slashin' as we speak

@Rubiksmoose butcher-pete

@Rubiksmoose I personally don't think the additional Find Familiar and other spell examples are necessary. THe big one is the Telepathy and it's language around CAN.

@NautArch the only reason I included find familiar was because OP mentioned it in the question.

@Rubiksmoose Gotcha, but you address that in your final bit - not sure it's necessary (but up to you). And sorry if you think I'm white knighting int he comments section:P.

I'll hold off on continuing that discussion in case Randomorph comes in here.

howdy @Randomorph\

Hello fellas

I definitely get what you are saying, but I think that @Rubiksmoose answer supplies reasoning on why that isn't the case (it totally overpowers Dominate over higher level spells like Telepathy)

I disagree with that premise, as outlined in my initial comment, however.

If a 5th level spell can give you full Telepathic communication AND control a creature - why would there the 8th level Spell that ONLY allows communication (other than the increased range?)

@NautArch although @Randomorph did have some compelling arguments for the increased power of telepathy

Telepathy additionally allows sensory information beyond just message, which is not a general rule for Telepathy.

Sorry that second telepathy should be lowercase

Rary's telepathic is another comparison (5th level, any distance besides interplanar)

Multiple creatures, longer duration, no concentration (big one)

Also a ritual

I guess I'm reading at specific overrides general. Telepathy does let you communicate (lowercase t), but DP says you can use your telepathy to control (not to chat)

Telepathy lets you communicate and goes on to explain the extent you can communicate. (Images being a really big advantage over any other forms of telepathy in the game)

@NautArch yeah it seems to me that there are telepathic links but their qualities differ based on the spell effects

and bridging Monster telepathy abilities (for 2-way) to PCs is a bridge too far for me. Monsters can do things PCs can't.

@NautArch I understand where you're coming from, but it's not from the Monster Manual, but the DMG which is less specifically about Monster Abilities

@Randomorph I"m coming from the Sage Advice clarification. It mentions as a counter specifically Monster abilities.

Which implies (and that's somehwat annoying) that PCs do NOT work that way - as evidenced by Awakened Mind.

@NautArch oh yes, that's fair then, I was just extrapolating on that point, which I feel is somewhat fair given the DMG text. But I understand if you don't agree.

Keep in mind Word of Crawford can be contradictory at times, and that's RAI, not RAW.

Also a tweet as opposed to an edited and proofread work.

@Randomorph Yeah this seems like a language precision issue that crops up pretty commonly. I must admit that I find myself drifting between which arguments I find more convincing.

@Rubiksmoose to be fair, you had me mostly convinced until the power level argument, which I found broke it for me

@Randomorph Well, it's not Sage Advice tweets - it's the published Sage Advice. That's not just word of Crawford. It's word of Wizards. WHich makes it RAW.

@Randomorph Actually though that is from the official Sage Advice column which is edited and published on the site

@Randomorph I mean I thought the argument stood on its own without the spell level argument

@Rubiksmoose @NautArch yes, that's true, my mistake. However it still only pertains to the Awakened Mind class feature.

@Randomorph Yes and no. It was in response, but the explanation of telepathic abilities as one-way except for some Monsters is pretty clear. What isn't clear is if the one-way is for all instances that don't state specifically otherwise (like Rary's and Telepathy)

@Randomorph Interestingly "the feature doesn’t give that creature the ability to telepathically reply"

Yeah the argument is good one, but I think the Spell Balance argument is misleading, since many factors contribute to the relative balance of a spell. Concentration being an enormous weighting factor, along with range, and duration.

@Randomorph You've got me on board with that :)

Yeah the one way telepathy argument has been a thorny issue since Crawford's Awakened Mind tweet

The argument is really about not giving something more than what it says (especially in comparison to language provided in other things.) My argument is that for DP, it says you have a telepathic bond that you use to control. Not that you use to communicate.

This basically says what I was saying right? An ability has to give the right to communicate in either direction. It is not assumed. That SA definitely implies that telepathy cannot be just assumed to be two way communication and that the ability must be specified right?

@NautArch Me too. I'll remove it. Too hard to quantify and compare the power levels.

My argument is the DMG explicitly says Telepathy as a default is respondable

It doesn't grant that creature telepathy, but it grants you the ability to hear a reply

I think the argument of "The spell doesn't imply 2-way communication" is much stronger than trying to interpret the meaning of spell slot power.

@MikeQ agreed, and that was my original argument

@Randomorph Yeah that is interesting. But then again, the spell doesn't grant telepathy perse but creates a "telepathic link". This is getting pretty semantic, but there might be a meaningful distinction there

@Rubiksmoose but when there's no definition, the general rule is to fall back onto English usage

Which I also commented, telepathic link in common English is defined as Send and Read

@Randomorph Creating a telepathic link is not the same thing as having Telepathy.

@NautArch but Rary's also specifies Telepathic Link. The supporting text only states they can communicate ignoring all language barriers.

Also distance

I'm not sure "telepathic link" has a fixed definition, since as far as research and historical documentation goes, it's not real.

@MikeQ it has a common English usage though, and telepathy has a definition as well

@Randomorph It also specifies what you can do with that link. I guess that's where I"m hung up. Your saying that the link has general qualities and I"m saying the link has specific qualities defined by the language of the ability/spell.

The general quality is that two minds are connected. Full stop.

Yes I believe that's the crux of the issue @NautArch

The general quality is the English definition of said quality.

Ah - but I don't thin you can necessarily do that when discussing D&D abilities and spells.

Linking two minds telepathically otherwise has zero mechanical effect

It's magic, not general english language use.

@NautArch it's one of the core tenets of 5th edition rules, actually.

@Randomorph The mechanical effect is defined by the ability/spell.

And the Sage Advice clarified that unless it says 2-way, it's not. So the assumption you're making has already been disproven.

@Randomorph Not exactly true. A link can be broken even if it was not currently having an effect.

Actually, the sage advice says "The feature is intended to provide one-way communication. The warlock can use the feature to speak telepathically to a creature, but the feature doesn’t give that creature the ability to telepathically reply."

All language is 100% specific to Awakened Mind

@Randomorph Except the implication that two-way must be given and is not assumed (which seems to conflict with the PHB)

@Rubiksmoose but that's you extrapolating even more than I am with the DMG definition of telepathy being two way.

@doppelgreener SHould we move this thread of conversation to the chat link you created and continue there?

But yeah we are just kind of spinning our wheels now.

The word "link" does not have enough information to imply that it is a two-way, symmetric communication. It could mean "one way message" or "two way message" or "boy in green tunic". The spell doesn't say anything about two-way communication, and AFAIK the PHB and other books don't say that all telepathic communication must be symmetric.

@MikeQ telepathic does however

Outside of Telepathy, Rary's, and Awakened Mind - is there another that we could look at the language for telepathic communication?

Find Familiar and Find Steed have telepathy language

Animate Dead has telepathic commands as well I believe

Nvm, Animate Dead is "Bonus action to mentally command"

and both state specifically " you can communicate telepathically"

DP does not say that.

Neither does Rary's directly.

Rary's clarifies that you can communicate ignore distance and language barriers.

dndbeyond.com/spells/beast-bond

@Randomorph yeah, it does "Until the spell ends, the targets can communicate telepathically "

"Until the spell ends, the targets can communicate telepathically through the bond whether or not they have a common language" @NautArch that was cherry picking the sentence

Beast Bond needs to clarify since beasts do not normally have language, but good find Rubiks

@Randomorph No, it's the clarification on the spells ability in the last paragraph.

Regardless, those other effects enable two-way communication because they explicitly say so. Dominate Person does not mention anything about communication or receiving input from the target.

helm of telepathy says: "you can use a bonus action to send a telepathic message to a creature you are focused on. It can reply—using a bonus action to do so—while your focus on it continues"

Helm of Telepathy is a single message at a time, not a telepathic link

@MikeQ it mentions a telepathic link. Then goes on to say your commands issued through that link are followed.

My argument is that every case of two-way (or even one-way) communication specifcially says you can communicate. @Randomorph, you are saying that communication is assumed - but if it's assumed, then all of those cases should just say 'telepathic link'.