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.
Keen Mind: If I Recall Correctly
Review by Sam West, Twitter:@CrierKobold
Keen Mind exists for the extremely pedantic of us out there. Do you need to know which direction is north to best determine your characters in game route? Do you need to know how many hours are left of daylight to the second? Do you need your character to have perfect memory skills? Then Keen Mind gives you that!
The hard truth of the matter is that almost no character really wants any of this. Finding north is a fairly basic skill, and is rarely all that practical to figure out without access to the sun. Survival checks and a map or two are going to be the predominant tool for travel; rarely is a DM going to ask for super specific navigational techniques. A lot of this is baked into the archetypes and character concepts. A ranger who’s spent their life traversing the wilderness probably knows how to find out what way north is when it matters. A wizard practiced in studying the stars has no problem figuring this kind of thing out either. In both of these cases, you never really need to know which way is north. Your character just incorporates that element into their navigation, like checking wind speeds, discerning tracks and signs of life, and recognizing a game trail.
Knowing the exact number of hours before sunrise or sunset is LAUGHABLY pointless. I have never in my decade-long DMing and playing with all kinds of people have come across a scenario where the party cared about exactly how many hours were left before daybreak or nightfall. Normally, gameplay involves waiting for one of those two to begin action. Knowing how long you’re waiting is like figuring out what the elevator music’s name is. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter, and it’ll just happen while you wait to get where you want to be going. Even with interrupted rests, knowing “it's still the dead of night” is often good enough to figure out if you have time to finish the rest or not. It doesn’t help that interrupting rests often can feel like a dick move, and is something great DMs have figured out how to manage beyond “If you rest you might get ambushed, who knows!”
Finally, we have the odd duck of a tool to recall information you’ve seen or heard perfectly. D&D puts us, as players and DMs, in a space where our minds have to fill in the majority of the missing details of a shared story. When you hear an NPC talk about something fishy, you talk about it with the party. When a major event occurs, like a riot in the town square, important details are physically noted on paper. Functionally, this acts as perfect recollection. To keep the game moving forward, outside of mental magical interference with something like a Modify Memory, your DM wants you to remember events. This feature more than offering anything practical tells DMs that player characters should be forgetting things, which is incredibly frustrating to play with. Having to go from a session one night to one two weeks later and reckon with your character maybe misremembering events you remember just fine is infuriating. This shouldn’t be a feature.
If you need a +1 Int to get a 13, 14, 16, or 18, this is technically a way to do it. Observant is a way more powerful option to consider, and even Linguist’s extra languages will open up some RP opportunities and extra tools. Magical feats from Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything like Telekinetic offer you a real tool to use that empowers your character in a bunch of interesting ways, and still gives you that +1 Int if you want it. Keen Mind is a feat that serves little to no purpose; you’re better off taking almost any other feat or just the Ability Score Improvement over this.
Thank you for visiting!
If you’d like to support this ongoing project, you can do so by buying my books, getting some sweet C&C merch, or joining my Patreon.
The text on this page is Open Game Content, and is licensed for public use under the terms of the Open Game License v1.0a.
‘d20 System’ and the ‘d20 System’ logo are trademarks of Wizards of the Coast, Inc.
and are used according to the terms of the d20 System License version 6.0.
A copy of this License can be found at www.wizards.com/d20.
