You can use your action to touch a willing humanoid and perceive through its senses until the end of your next turn. As long as the creature is on the same plane of existence as you, you can use your action on subsequent turns to maintain this connection, extending the duration until the end of your next turn. While perceiving through the other creature's senses, you benefit from any special senses possessed by that creature, and you are blinded and deafened to your own surroundings.
Gaze of Two Minds: Do You See What I See?
Review by Sam West, Twitter: @CrierKobold
I’m a sucker for nifty effects. Features and powers that don’t tend to be clearly powerful, or work outstandingly well on their own. Gaze of Two Minds is this kind of ability; a weird power that does something fairly unique, I just… I can’t get use out of it. I’ve tried. I’ve seen players try. It just regularly fails to anything even remotely interesting.
There are a few issues with Gaze of Two Minds. The first largest I think is the typical use case for it is using it with fellow players. The problem there is it is not even remotely worth it even in some of the most specific cases you’d think it’d shine in. Imagine the druid turning into a bat and flying into the darkness; having the warlock back them up by using Gaze of Two Minds to detect what they detect can be a way to inform the party if the bat runs into danger. How is that particularly useful, though? A roper can still wrap up the bat and strand the druid alone a quarter mile away, eating them long before the party can arrive. If it's within running distance, or you're following along blindly in the dark being led by a friend while you’re blind to your surroundings, there are simple mundane ways to keep tabs on the player scouting ahead without needing to take this. Otherwise, other player characters tend to have a really easy time coming back and reporting their findings, or aren’t in positions where you perceiving remotely what they perceive actually changes much.
So let's say you’re using it on an NPC. Maybe it's for information gathering, like planting a bug on somebody. For this to work out, you need an inside man already; can’t they just tell you what they experience? How much better is it to perceive it yourself with their senses? If you already have somebody who will willingly let you use this on them, chances are they’ll tell you what they see and hear when asked.
Trying to expand out the use cases beyond this gets fuzzy, and starts to feel like you’re treating hirelings and other party members like familiars. You can already take Voice of the Chain Master, which in addition to giving you the Gaze of Two Minds ability on your familiar, which can be invisible if it's an imp, also lets you speak through it, making it a remote communication tool beyond observation. That’s STILL incredibly niche, and not particularly remarkable, but at least it's a slightly larger upgrade over the 100 ft. distance limitation regular Find Familiar has.
If you want this kind of ability, getting access to Find Familiar is going to be a way better route to go. If you’re already using pact of the chain or tome, Find Familiar is easily within reach, either by the nature of pact of the chain or as a ritual taken with Book of Ancient Secrets. Being able to use this kind of ability on people is nifty, but even I can’t justify trying it out. There are just too few practical applications that reasonably empower your character to justify it.
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