Use Survival with Knowledge nature to forage for herbs

[Abraxus]

Hello,
My party's Druid is interested in foraging through the wilderness for plants and fungi that she can use as spell components, special substances and ingredients for drugs and poisons.
What is an appropriate DC for finding things this way... and how long would be required to take 20 on the roll?
I was just wondering if anybody has compiled a random herbal treasure list of the official herbs mentioned in 3.5 canon. It would really rock if you could post it here if you know of something like that.
My campaign is based on the Material Plane in a cold coniferous forest/tundra setting.
cheers.

 

[BlackSeed_Vash]

Not sure how helpful this might be, but the feat Primitive Caster does mention gathering material components for spells. Specifically, a DC 15 Profession (herbalist) check to find rare plants to add to spells.

I am unaware of any official herb list anywhere; however, I have seen/used several fan designed herb lists over the years. I enjoyed this one. You'll have to compile the list yourself though.

For how much time a 20 should take, I would consider the following:
1) The pacing of your game.
2a) Are they looking for a specific herb, or just any they can use.
2b) If specific, how rare is that herb.
3)How much of the herb are they going to need to cast 1 spell? And are you going to make them keep track?
For me, I would generally keep it between 4 and 7 days. (I would allocate 1 search taking 4 hours.)

Last but not least, Complete Adventure has rules for crafting poisons in the skill section. And if you have access to Kingdom of Kalamar Player's Guide (pg 119), it has reasonable rules for modifying poisons DCs, delivery method, and how to increase/decrease primary and secondary damage.

Best of Luck

 

[Abraxus]

Cheers boss, that's a huge help.

If anyone is interested I have now collated all the plant/fungal substances used in the 3.5 rulebooks as poison materials, drug materials, optional spell components, special craft materials etc as searchable treasure

 

[Empirate]

If this is about plants etc. that have an actual money value, I'd probably handle this via a fitting Profession or Craft skill, using the normal rules for those skills: whether you forge a suit of armor with Craft (Armorer) or forage for medicinal/poisonous herbs with Craft (Poisonmaking) shouldn't make a difference. If we're strictly talking raw materials, I'd default to the Profession (Herbalist) skill and follow the rules from there.


Note that this is mostly a waste of time for a PC unless your game world has a very restricted economy where wild growing plants are concerned. PCs can usually save a bunch of time just killing some trolls and buying all the herbs they want with the trolls' treasure - exchanging risk for time, essentially.

 

[Abraxus]

Agreed,
But I have new players and I don't like to stop players from using my settings however they choose...
I'm going to allow survival synergized with knowledge nature to perform the same function as profession: herbalist in this instance, perhaps at a minor penalty if I feel they are trying to nerf it.

The rationale is... there is a little time to kill while the party is resting, so... the druid wishes to scout the surrounding area to see if there is a plant growing that will serve as a component. If she is going to actively search for one thing in particular, then that's going to take a whole day. Otherwise, an hour recon of the immediate surroundings should have the potential to reveal this kind of treasure.

I have split substances into three catagories... Moderately common (market value 25-150gp), rare (150-750gp) and exceptionally rare (750gp+). I will be rolling a percentage die to see if something here is actually present, perhaps 1 roll for each hour spent looking (0-50 no, 51-80 moderately common, 81-94 rare, 95-100 very rare).
Then the player needs to take a survival/knowledge nature check to see if they actually find it and can identify it (DC15 moderately common, DC20 rare, DC25 very rare).

Searching for one thing in particular takes a day and no percentage die roll is required, you just take the survival/nature check at a -5 penalty.

I'd probably allow Search synergized with 5 ranks of survival to perform this task at an even simpler level, with a further DC penalty, provided the character actually knew what they were looking for.

What they do with such treasure is a different story, as invariably it needs to be crafted in order for someone to use it. They can also sell the material components for a fraction of the market value of the finished product. Kingdom's of Kalamar Players' Guide does indeed have a pretty solid system for working this out, thanks a lot for that. If the players ask I would definitely allow hour by hour searches for "common" herbs with an in-game function like garlic or beladonna (DC15 as per above).