I am starting a new 2e star trek adventure games, and my players are telepathy heavy. I don’t mind this one bit. But I am a bit confused about the rules. Mabey you people can help me out.
With telepathy (p.156): You can sense emotions and surface thoughts of most living beings nearby.
Open book (p.151):When a character enters a scene, you may spend 1 Momentum
(Immediate) to immediately ask the gamemaster one question about that character’s current
emotions or surface thoughts.
What’s the difference and why does one cost momentum? is this talent not already covert by telepathy?
The first difference I see is that Open Book doesn’t cost an action to use. Also there’s no roll associated so you can’t improve your insight or create advantage.
I think the synergy can be good. With open book you can judge if a telepathy roll is needed to improve your first impression.
This was giving as a response on reddit:
Fundamentally, telepathy is a sense, just like sight, hearing, or smell. Being able to perceive things is not the same as gaining useful information, and just because you have the ability to sense something does not always mean you’ll notice the important details. A telepath may still need to concentrate or make effort to make sense of the minds in their vicinity, or to pick out the pertinent information from the din of minds around them, just like any other character may need to focus to pick out specific voices or words in a crowded, noisy room.
In the case of the telepathy ability and the open book talent, the former is what enables the latter: you can’t do the latter without being telepathic or empathic, and it represents a particular knack for grabbing keen and pertinent insights almost reflexively from the minds around you, where a lesser telepath might need to work harder (maybe a task roll) to sift through the thoughts of people nearby and find such knowledge.