D&D General Odd Speak with Dead Question

[TiQuinn]

The “for future reference” thing is what makes this a No for me.

If this situation had come up in game, and the PCs found a carved door with a face on it, and wanted to do this on the fly, I’d be much more tempted to allow it to work.

But the player is asking in advance, if I’m understanding correctly. I don’t think scratching your own face and eyes into a door carries with it the same weight as a door that was carefully carved to have a face. The effort is the thing. The spontaneity is what makes the idea cool, not any kind of premeditation.

Of course, there’s always the matter of to do this, you’d probably need to cast both Speak with Dead AND Speak with Plants (because trees don’t speak common) and ultimately find that the door may not “know” much other than who has passed through it recently. That’s a big outlay of spells for not a lot of info.

 

[BookTenTiger]

I don't think it's in the Rules as Intended, but it would be a really cool opportunity for the character to invent their own version of the spell! "Speak with Doors" is a really evocative spell name.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

There are a whole list of reasons this is a no.

1) dead plants are not corpses. “Oh look, corpse salad”.

2) an artistic representation of a mouth is not a mouth. You can’t paint a mouth onto a headless corpse in order to interrogate it.

3) a small part of a body made into something else is not a corpse. A string of sausages is not a corpse. A skull made into a drinking vessel is not a corpse.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

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.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

From a practical point of view, Speak with Dead is a spell you should keep a tight lid on if you ever hope to run a non-trivial murder mystery. HAT has it right, trying to get the information you want should be a challenging minigame. Which means a very legalistic interpretation of its rules and restrictions is the way to go.

 

[Cadence]

From a practical point of view, Speak with Dead is a spell you should keep a tight lid on if you ever hope to run a non-trivial murder mystery. HAT has it right, trying to get the information you want should be a challenging minigame. Which means a very legalistic interpretation of its rules and restrictions is the way to go.

Tangentially, I had never wondered about how that spell would affect how murderers went about things in D&D worlds. (I'm going to be thinking about this as I continue with the various cozy mysteries I watch).

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Tangentially, I had never wondered about how that spell would affect how murderers went about things in D&D worlds. (I'm going to be thinking about this as I continue with the various cozy mysteries I watch).

Attack from behind

Use Change Self

Use Invisibility

Cut off and remove the head so there is no mouth

Destroy the body so there is no corpse

Cast it on the corpse yourself for ten day’s grace.

 

[Mannahnin]

Yeah, I used to see that kind of problem-solving get a lot of discussion in the AD&D days. And ways for assassins and such to work around raise dead, like taking away part of the body, or inserting a long thin needle into the brain at the base of the skull and concealing it under their hair, with the idea that if they were raised they'd instantly die again thanks to the needle.

 

[Mort]

This would be a no from me.

D&D spell casting is basically consequence free - cast spell get result, every time. As a trade-off, for me, the spell does what the spell says, no more.

Now, since this is a "for future reference" question. Perfect opportunity to discuss with the player what developing the spell that DOES what he wants entails. And what it will cost (monetary or adventure wise) to do so.

 

[DEFCON 1]

Does the door the player plans to talk to have something interesting and compelling to say? Will it drive the party's actions forward in the campaign? Will it be fun or funny? If it is any of those things... then I say yes absolutely.

If we are good with PCs talking with other people, or talking with the dead, or talking with plants, or talking with animals or talking with pretty much anyone or anything... all because they each might have a piece of information that is worth spending the time talking to them for... then WHY NOT a door? Or a carriage? Or a sofa? Or some other object? I mean come on... if the D&D game historically has had magical spells that have allow for the PCs to "see" or "feel" what happened to these objects in the past (all in the name of giving PCs interesting information that they can use in their stories and actions going forward)... then why not let them just TALK to said object instead? What difference does it make?

The players always try to acquire information because it will inform their decisions and their actions going forward and will take the party off into interesting avenues and directions that they might not otherwise have gone if they hadn't acquired it. So why would any DM want to prohibit that? What would be the point? Just because the "game mechanic" as written wouldn't allow for that? How dumb. That's when "game mechanics" can go stuff themselves in my opinion.

If there is information that can be acquired by the players and that information can be useful to the players and the players think up interesting or cool ways to attain said information... then I always say go for it. "Rules As Written" be damned.