D&D: Using Feats for Infinite Knowledge! 

Even though Keen Mind doesn't directly raise your intelligence, it gives you special skills that can let you stockpile infinite knowledge. In the right situations you can abuse that fact to raise your INT (not the stat) into infinity! Honestly half the video is describing what 'Intelligence' is as a stat and how Keen mind can let you raise the stat artificially. I agree the original title was misleading, but nothing about what I covered was blatantly wrong. And for anyone wondering, you can get 'Keen Mind' at level 1 if you choose 'Variant Human' as your starting race.

So basically: "Hey there's this one D&D feat that'd be really useful in this one anime."

We have a house rule that if a character has an intelligence score of 30, they become self aware of the game they are in.

Blaine: "Keen Mind is garbage." *Caleb Widogast has entered the chat*

"keen mind is garbage" XD more like a free "hey DM whats that thing that happened 3 weeks ago the players forgot but my character remembers"

"And so you see DM, that is why my intelligence score is actually functionally infinity, and why therefore my magic weapon attacks should do infinite damage." "Alright that's all fine and good but on the other hand no." *immediately regrets own intelligence*

Keen Mind is very useful in games with more realism. Caleb Widogast, from Critical Role, has the Keen Mind feat, and it's benefitted the party a lot due to Liam O'Brian being able to just ask the DM everything he, as the player, forgot.

My DM: You should take notes because tracking informations is very important in this campaign. Me: Keen Mind

Dr. Stone: Variant Human, plus to Int, and Con, Gourmand and Keen Mind feat Languages: Common (Japanese), and.... uh what ever mess is English. Artificer/Ranger; he is excellent at re-inventing things from our time and similarly great survival skills

Keen mind is actually really good if you're a wizard. Perfect memory means you can remember your entire spellbook, or reproduce anything with minor conjuration and prestidigitation.

"Why would you waste a Feat on Keen Mind when a simple Survival check would do the trick for most of what you get?" "Because I find playing an abysmal Wisdom score to be hilarious, and I don't have the Survival Proficiency anyway." :P

For those of you who don’t know, he kept count. He counted every second. For a thousand years or so

Alt title: How to have 189 IQ in D&D edit: okay, 189, happy?

I'm very confused about whether or not he means "int score" or "int modifier" since they seem to be being used interchangeably in some parts of the video, but otherwise very well made and I look forward to more.

"keen mind is garbage" Well you sir have never played a necromancer wizard managing an undead army. If you can't pin point the exact time you cast that create undead spell, as well as how long it's been since then, you might turn around to find your whight second in command has gone rogue, eaten the bard, and is coming after you with the crack skeleton team you set him up with, the ungrateful bastard. You don't make that mistake twice.

Keen Minded Loxodon Cause elephants never forget

I'm going to do this, just to see how my DM justifies why I can't do this.

me: an intellectual who has seen dr. stone.... he counted.... a LOT

Obtained beyond maximum intelligence. Cthulhu has entered the chat.

if caleb has taught me anything,keen mind is a must have,especially for magic users. (my wizard will 100% get this and also maybe lucky if l can get away with that.)

How to achieve this WITHOUT a feat. Step 1 > Play as a Grung (frog race from Volo's Guide to Monsters) Step 2 > Wait upto 7 days. Step 3 > Say "It is Wednesday, my dudes"

This is kind of clickbait. It's really how to do the boring bit of Dr Stone in D&D and ignores the main issue for the anime which is the fact one loses consciousness fast if one doesn't focused.

If you add on age bonuses being petrified in stone while awake for thousands of years, keen mind let's you keep your sanity while accruing all those sweet sweet int boosts. And when it wears off, your body is still as limber and nimble as when it was petrified

Well, this was disappointing.

I like how you spend all of two seconds explaining how you max out your intelligence, but then 4 minutes about how to avoid waking up in the Summer or Winter.

Keen mind definitely gets a lot of shade, but In the right scenario it can be invaluable. Any adventure in the underdark or some kind of skyless mega-dungeon and this feat is already worth its weight in compasses, clocks, and sextants.

Finally I can ace my exams

since warforged can theoretically live forever, and a tome of clear thought can be used once every 100 years, an eons-old robot sentry with an intelligence stat in the thousands or even millions is possible

Keen Mind's biggest effect is making it so your DM takes notes for you. Your character remembers it even if you didn't write it down, so you get the benefit of notes without having to write anything down.

100 likes, 0 dislikes. Perfectly balanced, as all things should be.

Nice to remember that some player knowledge helps to rise that stats, like being creative and other things that comes from the mind of who is interpreting the character

That character knew the season because he was counting every second. yup, he perfectly counted for centuries.

But if you had high wisdom you'd be good enough at survival that it would not matter when you break out of the stone because you can survive in any season.

Great video! Really amazing and top quality. Super awesome to have someone do a deep dive into the rules to make these awesome short vids!

My tiefling wizard has 24 int, got blessed with deck of many things and i won a dice poker tournament for a lesser tome of intellect.

The smart dude knew when to get out by counting each and every second so that he knew the right season to get out

_[takes the Keen Mind feat]_ I FINALLY UNDERSTAND WHY KIDS LOVE THE TASTE OF CINNAMON TOAST CRUNCH!

Or as Matt Mercer calls it: the DM's bane feat!

In my campaign I made magic that temporary gives you knowledge in a field for an hour. Uncommon gave you proficiency in a skill, rare proficiency with an item and very rare a feat. It worked very well for thing that are situational.

Couldn't you use Keen Mind to make Shawn Spencer from psych and become a fake psychic?

I cast fireball

So, you’re telling me a kenku with keen mind is basically a month long tape recorder! This is giving me some interesting ideas...

Dude, you literally answered your own question because he literally COUNTED time

Senku Enough said

You can get infinite int with tomes this applies to any stat manuals for phsyical stats too but people hate reading so hm

Dr stone is so good

So worth noting: keen mind synergizes with getting textbooks/lorebooks, as such as long as you set aside time within each month to refresh the reading you did you can keep the bonuses they give to your skill checks, grabbing enough of these to cover every subject actually makes for some serious mental power boost as you can have all collected knowledge under your belt forever. In a similar fashion if you happen to get any of the stat increasing artifact books you would be about the only person ever to actually be able to remember what is in the said books and thus would be able to at least attempt to recreate it even if re-reading it from memory didnt work as the training itself causes the effect in theory.

Can you make Maple from BOFURI in DnD? I understand that's quite the task given what Maple is, but still.

Senku literally kept himself busy by counting. I'm sure he just figured out through mathmetics what the season outside was.

Him: wizards and artificers need it to spell cast. Me: Cries in arcane trickster and eldritch knight.

While I agree with most of this, one thing I have to comment on. "The human mind can only track so much information". This may be true, and it may not. We still haven't discovered the limits of our capacity to retain and understand our surroundings. Some people speculate that if we'd remembered every single thing in out entire lives, in a picturesque perfection, we could remember 140 years of it. But, no one remembers that much, first of all, and second of all, that's just that. Speculation. No one has ever lived that long(that we know of), much less someone who had perfect recall. In a state like this, where your five senses are shut off, I'd reckon we could increase that number very substantially. But my point is, we don't know the limits of the human mind. We don't know what makes it tick, precisely, and we only vuagely understand some of its capabilities. Add magic and other fictional races to the mix and the possibilities are endless.

Nice vid

It was decided that anyone with anything below 10 wasn’t sentient... turns out my character had a 9

I actually built a variant human Artificer/Wizard which started with Keen Mind and got Observant as their first feat and yes the character's raw mental acuity does often break the game.

Keen Mind is not garbage at all. It's a FEAT, that lets you be immune to SPELLS. Don't believe me? Modify Memory and Feeblemind. Two of the most powerful villain-manipulation spells in the game. Either of these could reasonably prevent you from remembering things normally, but Keen Mind is a blanket statement. Even if your mind is altered through Modify Memory, you could argue that the feat protects everything you remember from the last month, which if true would INCLUDE knowledge that your memories were tampered with. Even Feeblemind doesn't break this, meaning you can remember who you were for the past month and potentially think of ways to fight back and break the control of the spell. Not directly in either case, but perfect memory can be a huge advantage against similarly smart opponents, since villain high Int creatures are likely villain spellcasters and villain spellcasters LOVE these spells. Doesn't protect you from everything else they have though. . It IS bested by Linguist though. Still +1 Int, but you get extra Languages and cipher-making skills. Not as vital in the situations it's used in, but much more commonly used. Intelligence in general is a stat that is rarely of consequence outside of spellcasting but has huge repercussions in the rare moments outside of that in which it's used, so Keen Mind is a lot more in line with that philosophy with the stat. . "Simple minded," and "Intelligence-based spellcaster" is a paradox. Wizards are good at magic because they learned a complicated system of rules and methods that allow them to alter reality at a fundamental level. That's not simple minded, but I imagine it was a sarcastic jab so whatevza.

Will this give me a dumb high IQ of 189?

Blaine: infinite knowledge through feats me, who had a +4 from level 1 and maxed out INT at level 4: laughs in smart

It’s BIG BRAIN time. :)

Me: Is infamous among anyone I've played D&D with for making characters that don't need a high intelligence intelligent anyway, and constantly making intelligence checks and to solve or get an advantage in any basically any situation ever, resulting in everything from weaponized chameleons to a wizard SOMEHOW knowing EXACTLY what traits male crabs find attractive in female crabs, to a ranger somehow winding up as the biology, anatomy, and medical expert in a party that contained two wizards and a life cleric. Me, after watching this video: Well then. Now I know what feat to give my character next time I get the option to pick one up! :D

Basically, Keen Mind and access to knowledge on a topic allows you to pull a Rogue on any Intelligence checks on that topic in the past month and just automatically succeed.

I am a huge fan of taking Keen Mind on Illusionists, or even on people who like using _minor illusion_ a lot. The perfect memory means you can perfectly create images of things you've seen, removing any chance that you might get details wrong. Or, if you do get them wrong (perhaps your DM requires artistry checks), you know you got them wrong and can try to explain it to others. Moreover, as long as you keep reviewing your memories - perhaps with journal entries or illusory walls of text - you can make sure that you have things from months ago that you've re-experienced in the last 30 days.

Me playing a wizard with 20 int while having an actual intelligence of 8

Summary of video: If your stuck in a stone prison that makes you immortal you can count how long you have been stuck, you can then try to argue with your DM that because your counted the number of days and keep track of your thoughts during this process you have become smarter. Sure. Good luck with that.

2:08 there are 20+ senses not five

Keen mind is really good especially if you're a player that is really bad at remembering details waking the critical role campaign 2 Caleb remembers everything in it comes in handy so many times

Alright listen, I’m too lazy to do the math but I know the solution without taking this awful feat. Measure breathing room. Stone expands, even just a little in heat, and contracts in cold. Therefore you can measure the season via how squished you are. Now you might say “but you can’t feel so how would you know.” Well you see the answer is so. We have a couple of other senses than the main five. One of them is the ability to know where you body parts are even with your eyes closed and stuff. And assuming that your brain. And assuming your brain is still working we can assume that at least some of the nervous system is working. So you might be able to feel a bit anyway. This concludes my ted talk.

what about having other low ability scores like Wisdom Charisma etc

I always found the INT scaling on monsters to be... weird. Take a Beholder: this cosmic abberation is playing 5D chess with the world itself, launching infinitely intricate schemes and having like 500 contigency plans for everything you can throw at it, yes even your army of summoned angels or that Gate spell you connected to the core of the Sun Itself. The only beings it fears are other Beholders. So what's it's Intelligence score like? *17* Yes, my party's wizard, who is worse than our 10 INT Barbarian at solving puzzles and riddles, has 20 INT. Buuut if said wizard's player was just as smart as his character, who also happens to have 18 WIS, then someone with 16 INT would already be considered on par with Albert Einstein, and your average lv8 Wizard would be so incredibly smart that they could easily figure out a few surefire ways to beat a Beholder at 5D chess, or succesfully raid it's lair to kill it. 20 INT Wizards would be absolutely terrifying with schemes and strategies that put the hyperintelligent Beholders to shame.

3:24 I F--- CALLED IT! INT MAXED

Alternatively, be like Senku and know because you are keeping perfect track of how many seconds pass and remember the time it was when you turned to stone. With this knowledge, you can then divide out the seconds to figure out what time of day it is and what time of year it is, both of which let you more or less tell when sunrise and sunset are and can give you a general idea of if it will be cold or hot. Obviously you can't know the exact weather, but if your calculations show its the middle of winter, expect it to be cold, at least for your area, and if you normally get snow, expect there will be some on the ground, if it isn't snowing. Inversely, if you live in a hotter climate and know its going to be the middle of summer, you know its probably going to be unbearably hot, unless there's a thunderstorm. And with that knowledge, which way is North is pointless until you escape, and your perfect tracking of time helps you figure it out when you do escape by looking at where the sun (if its day) or North Star (if its night) should be at that time

Keen mind is like any of the survival focused stuff in 3.5. Whether there is any point depends on who your DM is.

You must simply have the *SmRT*

BIG BRAIN

When I saw North, I immediately knew it was keen mind lol

There is a homebrew race on reddit that adds +2 to Str Con Cha but reduces Int and Wis by 3.

cus of this video I got hooked on Doctor Stone!

Variant title: This feat it so useless it takes an incredibly specific apocalypse scenario to be helpful!

SENKU JUST COUNTED

Also the eldritch invocation that lets you see through walls

I just like the great title!

We have been bamboozled

Ok. My character is a Druid, and as soon as they are turned to stone, the wild shape into a bear and break the stone.

Cmon man. You know this is click bait n switch

One thing about keen mind is: if you are led through a labirinth blindfolded, you can just count your steps and you have a pretty accurate idea of the way you took.

No new information was learned through this video... so if I had Keen Mind right now I wouldn't be stockpiling anything... right?

Neat.

Chicken grave

Literally Anyone: Keen Mind is useless Caleb Widogast:

When I first looked at this video, the guy looked like he lived in an insane asylum!, 😂

3:04 Doing the Ol' goldfish, are we?

nice

Keen Mind is VERY powerful when used with the right spell. Like, say... Scrying or Detect Thoughts.

This went off on a weird tangent really quickly.

It's also perfect for wizards... you only need your spellbook once a month with this feat

This is exhilarating.

All keen mind as done is annoy the dm.

when you said dr stone i went and watched all 24 episodes on season one of it and then came back

This is absurd levels of weird, at this point just 'you predict that the gods may attempt to strike you down if you continue' 'you have been struck by one lightning bolt per point of intelligence simultaneously, consecutively, per point of intelligence' 'the universe says no, you cease existing'

I just recently made a character that I was planning on being high intelligence that's not a magic user. So I rolled stats and got an 18 which I gave to Int, then I was a Rock Gnome which raised my int to 20, Gave him sage background so my History Ability was +7, The Artificer Lore Race Feat ment in certain situations History Checks we're Doubled. And I took rogue which the feat expertise meant If I wanted I could make my history Check +28 whenever I was checking a magic, alchemic, or tech item.

My tiefling warlock has a +4 to intelligence