Looking for cleaver uses for Speak w Plants.

[Torias Starym]

i'm looking for different ways to use the Speak with Plants spell other than the obvious. in our campaign, one of the PC's is a druid. she has caste this spell quite a few times and has never had the spell prove useful. every time she's caste the spell she's gotten pretty much the same result. "Mmmmm. Warm."
has our group made the spell useless or is the spell actually useless?

 

[Lord Pendragon]

Speak with Plants is the same as Speak with Dead, really, just using a different medium. Firstly, you have to be looking for information of a specific sort. Then, you have to ask the right corpse/plant, ie one that would be in a position to have the information you want.

So if you're just walking through the forest and randomly cast Speak with Plants, then "Mmmm, warm," sounds like a perfectly reasonable answer. On the other hand, if you're chasing a band of raiders who kidnapped the farmer's daughter and you come to a fork in the road, you might travel a few hundred yards down one path and ask the roadside plants, "Did riders come past here?" If they have, then you know which way the bandits have gone! If not, then you know they took the other fork!

Perhaps if you come to an isolated farmhouse with a farmer and his one daughter, and are suspicious about the daughter, you could ask plants on the farm, "how many people live in the house?" When the plant answers back, "One" you know that something funny is going on.

Aside from its divination value, Speak with Plants works on creatures of the [Plant] type, like Treants. And if they are friendly, you can use the spell to ask them for a favor (as determined by the DM.)

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

I'd personally rule that plants know a decent amount. They may not be able to deal in details or anything outside of their immediate vacinity, but they could tell you "Two beings walked past here just before the sun reached its height." or "It has not rained in 4 cycles of the sun." They may not be able to deal in details but perhaps "Much larger than me" or "Much smaller than me." would be good enough descriptions if you asked it what a creature looked like.

Overall, more useful for talking to plant creatures than actual plants. Still, I can see being able to get some information from a plant in an investigation style adventure that you couldn't get otherwise.

I think a lot of the trick is in knowing the right questions to ask and the right way to phrase them.

Majoru Oakheart

 

[Torias Starym]

i like the logic, and would like to be able to use the spell that way. my DM uses the logic that plants can't "see."
the druid has actually asked a great oak if anyone has passed in the last couple of hours. the answer she got was, "Mmmm. Warm. What's an hour?"

I wanted to tell the druid to ask this, but as i didn't have the spell and couldn't understand the conversation, we trudged on.
Druid: "Have you felt any vibrations in the soil lately?"

 

[Zad]

First speak to the plant. Lull it into a false sense of security.

Then chop it up with your cleaver.

 

[Verdigris]

Speak with Plants is worse than Speak with Dead because typical plants:

A) don't move
B) can't see, hear, or smell
C) don't have brains
D) know very little about the world outside of their little slice of it
E) etc.

The Dead at least, presumably, possessed enough of these qualities to be useful before kicking the bucket.

Still, it might fulfill a niche now and then, but in my opinion its spell level is way too high. It should be first level.

Most of the Druid's plant spells are a waste if you ask me. The Monster manual has a total of about 6 plants in it. MM2 has another 6 or so. Wee.

As for your request for creative suggestions of how to make use of the spell, allow her to glean information from things like the wooden hafts of weapons held by important NPCs, or the woven cotton fabric of their garments, or the tea leaves at the bottom of a discarded tea cup in the Witch's candy house...

 

[Lord Pendragon]

Speak with Plants is worse than Speak with Dead because typical plants:

I agree that Speak with Dead is typically better. But Speak with Plants isn't quite useless. The spell says that the plant's sense of its surroundings is "limited," but not that it can't see, hear, or smell and thus is blind and deaf to anything happening around it. It can give you pointers. And in a world of Golems and Shambling Mounds, lack of a brain is hardly proof of anything.

 

[AuraSeer]

the druid has actually asked a great oak if anyone has passed in the last couple of hours. the answer she got was, "Mmmm. Warm. What's an hour?"

If your DM is that determined to screw you over, there's no help for it. Have the druid memorize a spell that the DM doesn't hate... or find a better DM.

 

[Hypersmurf]

Best use of Speak With Plants?

Settle once and for all the argument about whether they like Beethoven or Rock'n'Roll better...

-Hyp.

 

[MeepoTheMighty]

Best use of Speak With Plants?

Settle once and for all the argument about whether they like Beethoven or Rock'n'Roll better...

-Hyp.

I did that one for a science project in 4th grade. Believe it or not, they really liked DJ Jazzy Jeff, and really hated Billy Ray Cyrus. Beethoven and Bon Jovi were somewhere in the middle.