Today one of my players asked me, for future reference, if speak with dead could be used on a door that has a face, including a mouth, carved into it, on the grounds that a door is just dead wood, and speak with plants is already a thing. My thinking is "no," because I think the spell implies a functional (or once functional) mouth, but...I kinda wanna say yes, because I think it's an awesome idea. How would you rule?
I think I'm gonna say yes, but only if speak with plants is also active.
I'm going to try and go through my full thought process here, mostly because this
type of question is something I think about a lot when DMing, and also on those rare occasions when I'm playing (a somewhat similar in concept, albeit very different in facts, issue came up in a PbP game I am in).
I start with two basic precepts when it comes to gaming-
1. I want to encourage creative solutions.
2. I want to encourage people playing their characters (roleplaying).
For me, those two points are usually intertwined. I grew up breathing in the ethos of "skilled play" (that's when gamers leveraged their personal knowledge to succeed- playing D&D as a game) and that still has an influence, but over time, I'd argue that it has been strongly displaced by a much more character-driven approach- approaching problems and trying to solve them as the character would (albeit with the player, obviously, thinking it through). This means that when creative solutions are being looked for, I try to evaluate them in terms of the
character, and not just the creativity. That sounds abstract, but let me make it more concrete.
The character has a personality. The character has a background. A class. Skills. Desires. Goals. Particular ways of doing things. Approaches to different tasks.
I think players have a conception of what their character is, and usually want to play to that. I don't want their character sheet to limit their creativity in that way. If a player is playing a character that acts consistently in X manner, and they want to do another X action, and there just isn't the right "button" on their character sheet to accomplish that- I will find a way to allow that to happen.
....but. There have to be limits. Spells, for example, are exceptions to the rules, with very specific wordings and limitations. "I want my fireball to do 12d6, because it booms better." Yeah, nope.
But more than that, I think the dividing line for me, usually, is that I want to work with the player when they are trying to
effectuate their character, and I tend to draw the line
when they are just working around the limits of the rules. Which seems like an arbitrary and subjective line - but it's always pretty easy to spot in practice, and clear communication at the table resolves any edge cases.
Applying my principles, how would I resolve this question?
The question as posed, with the information provided. Hard no. It's being asked "for future reference," (in other words, this is a plan, not a creative solution driven by exigent circumstances) that directly contradicts hard limits in a spell and seems like it might just be used in an annoying manner (carving faces on doors). Moreover,
even if I did allow it (which I wouldn't, because that's not the spell), then the tree died long before it became a door and would provide no useful information.
That said, if this was something that the player had some "character vision" for- say, some type of seer / medium (Rary) / spirit channeler and their whole "gestalt" was actually about gathering information from different sources, and they wanted one of their features to include the ability to draw faces on doors in order to speak to them, I'd find a way to make it work.
