Spell Redesign: Speak With Plants

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Next in our list of spells that do exactly what they’re supposed to, speak with plants. There’s plenty to praise when it comes to this spell; the level, the extra effects, the limitations on interacting with plants, the whole thing.

Look at how many additional effects there are! Someone already gave this the “me” treatment, trying to incentivise the players using the spell by way of broader potential applications. The spell level was a curious note as well; this is a third level spell? Speak with animals is a 1st level spell! Animals are probably more useful for day to day adventuring, right? And besides, speak with animals is divination, why isn’t speak with plants?

Then it hit me; this spell is like passwall (an upcoming entry), but for plants instead of rock and stone! What a conundrum, being able to bypass terrain within a dungeon environment can be extremely useful for escapes, retreats, stealing loot, you name it. This spell could function as an even better passwall in a natural dungeon environment, so much so that I’m tempted to drop a few speak with plants scrolls in the fae hollows players will soon encounter in my active Chill Mist Valley campaign. The players could use the spell to bypass or negate traps and hazards, encounters, and get more information about whatever lays on the other side!

Any issue with “pick rate” is then not the fault of this spell at all, but rather the environments people use it in, and how frequently. This is a tricky place to be as a designer; I could make the spell so good folks couldn’t help bringing it along every adventure. I could make a spell so powerful that folks wouldn’t be able to resist exploiting every possible use case. Alas, a game where speak with plants is more powerful than fireball would be incredibly weird., and we’d all rightfully raise our eyebrows at whatever campaign it produced. There simply aren’t enough natural environments to use the 1-2 punch of asking the vines and leaves you’re about to have make a hole in the wall what’s on the other side of that wall in most of our games.

My only hope, my only hope is to significantly increase the range of potential uses for the spell, such that players can’t help but bring it along without grossly inflating the power of the spell.

Speak With Plants (Even Cooler)

I have to break my format, here. Normally I title revisions Better, Even Better or Cooler, Even Cooler in the rare cases I like a spell, or think it’s already pretty good for some reason. This spell was so well done, the margins for a balanced improvement were so thin, and my ideas for modifiers were so constrained that I couldn’t realistically do two separate iterations.

Let’s go through the changes:

  • Information gained now covers the past week; this makes it far more valuable for information gathering, and gives us a better hook into exploratory play.

  • Moving plant life is now even easier with this spell, allowing you to rearrange thorn walls and trees.

  • You can direct plant life to end conditions and other effects on creatures, not just Restrained a la the entangle spell.

  • Plants can offer you one of several boons in exchange for a bargain. I think the prompts are sufficiently evocative for a GM’s description to boost verisimillitude, when matched with the correct scenario. A treant summoning a dryad for you would certainly be fun!

  • There is now a Higher Levels addition, which adds range and expands the range of time plants can answer questions about.

Finally, most importantly:

  • The spell can now be cast as a ward, leaving it behind to activate on some other condition.

I really think this last change will be the most significant for folks considering it. Using plants to bar access to specific individuals, to hide specific places or things from unwanted passers-by, to deliver messages or boons to a particular person, this spell is now a force multiplier for non-combat play. Glyph of warding generally isn’t seen as compatible with this spell, and you usually wouldn’t want to spend 200 gp to cast it with speak with plants anyways. I think this’ll make the spell significantly more attractive to anyone engaged even in nominally exploration focused play.