Can you replace Mage Hand with another cantrip after taking the Telekinetic feat and still benefit from the increased range?

Question

If an Artificer who knows the cantrip "Mage Hand" takes the "Telekinetic" feat, and then later exchanges "Mage Hand" for another cantrip after they level up, do they keep the extended range that comes with knowing "Mage Hand" when you take the "Telekinetic" feat?

Answer 1

No. You have to have both the feat and the cantrip to get the extended range.

The Telekininesis feat says, emphasis added:

You learn the mage hand cantrip. You can cast it without verbal or somatic components, and you can make the spectral hand invisible. If you already know this spell, its range increases by 30 feet when you cast it.

The plain English interpretation is that, having taken the Telekinesis feat, if you also know the Mage Hand cantrip, then your Mage Hand has a range of 60 feat. It doesn't matter when you learned the Mage Hand cantrip, or when you got the feat.

Three conditions are possible:

• You have the feat - you get invisible Mage Hand with 30 ft range
• You have the cantrip - you get visible Mage Hand with 30 ft range
• You have both - you get invisible Mage Hand with 60 ft range

The opposite, that once you give up the cantrip, you still get the range, is to argue that "if you already know this spell" means "if at the time of gaining the feat, you already know this spell, then its range for you is forever after extended to 60 ft." That is a convoluted interpretation of the language.

However, the most important person to ask is your DM. If there is in fact any ambiguity here, your DM will resolve it.

Answer 2

Learning Telekinesis grants you Mage Hand if you don’t know it (adding to your cantrip list) or adds range if you do. Because it’s an inherent property of Telekinesis you can’t remove it from your list of known cantrips, and the feat doesn’t offer you an alternative cantrip if you already know it. So I’d say that you only get the additional range if you already knew Mage Hand when you take the feat, and you can’t now lose the feat. If you want Mage Hand as an additional cantrip by taking Telekinesis, don’t have it (swap it out) prior to taking Telekinesis, and accept standard range. Consider telekinesis as adding “proficiency” to your Mage Hand skill. If you didn’t have Mage Hand when taking Telekinesis, uniquely I’d suggest that if you wanted to, then when next you gain a new cantrip you could “add” the additional range to Mage Hand instead of taking an additional cantrip.

Answer 3

The actual question here is whether the range benefit is permanently snapshotted upon learning the feat, or whether it get re-evaluated when its precondition changes. Or every time you cast the spell, since the feat's wording is:

If you already know this spell, its range increases by 30 feet when you cast it.

"If you already know this spell" makes sense in this context as "If you already know this spell from a source other than this feat".

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I don't think your hoped-for state is possible, of having Mage Hand with 60 ft range, but having it not count as one of your known cantrips for a class. That's very much a having your cake and eating it too situation, and the rules don't specifically allow for that. (e.g. it could say "if you already knew this cantrip [when you gained this feat]", but it doesn't.)

Assuming you have both cantrip and feat to start with, then upon "unlearning" Mage Hand from the other source, one of two situations are possible:

• You re-evaluate Telekinetic's benefits in light of your new spell list, and get invisible Mage Hand with 30 ft range.
• You don't know Mage Hand at all, because you chose to unlearn it. (And the benefits of Telekinetic were snapshotted once, at the moment you gained it.)

I think feats are normally written with the assumption that their conditions re-evaluate when other (semi-)permanent changes happen to your character. It seems most sensible to me that you'd be left with 30 ft Mage Hand if you dropped it from your cantrips-known in a spellcasting class.

This feat appears in TCE, which also introduced the cantrip versatility optional rule, so it could have been written to be 100% unambiguous, but I think the more sensible ruling is that it recalculates, instead of mattering what order you gained things in.

Note that a snapshot ruling would mean you couldn't gain 60 ft Mage Hand if you took Telekinetic first, and then at a later level learned Mage Hand through a class or Magic Initiate. But if the condition re-evaluates when you cast it, then narratively learning the Mage Hand cantrip lets you learn to use magic to enhance and combine with your psionic abilities, giving you the ability to do stuff at 60 ft range.

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I tried to look at existing feats to see if they provided any guidance, but for example XGE's Prodigy feat has the same potential ambiguity once you factor in TCE's Skill Versatility. The "you gain expertise" language looks pretty clearly written with the assumption that you can't lose basic proficiency, because it just doesn't make sense to keep expertise in a skill that isn't counting against your proficiency limit.

Choose one skill in which you have proficiency. You gain expertise with that skill, which means your proficiency bonus is doubled for any ability check you make with it. The skill you choose must be one that isn't already benefiting from a feature, such as Expertise, that doubles your proficiency bonus.