We have a ranger and a druid in our party and entangle somehow is one of our favorite spells. Our encounters early in the campaign were often bandits etc. that were just charging at us so we solved a lot of problems by entangling them and then killing them from a distance/simply ignoring them. Once some mages entered the stage it also came in handy since they had to do concentration checks and all that. Long story short our DM became sick of us overusing the spell massively, so now we are always fighting on rocky ground… ALWAYS.
So we started to think about how to circumvent the problem of lack of plants for entangling. One idea that came up (probably not gonna work, but it would be awesome, so I want to know for sure) is to pack some plants into some kind of grenade-like object and through/shoot it at the enemies so plants go everywhere and you can use entangle (yay!).
Can you build a plant grenade by the rules and if so how?
We are currently level 7. We don't have a lot of magical equipment though.
Best Answer
Livewood is a special material from the Eberron Campaign Setting which continues to survive even after it's been cut down. It is an explicitly valid target for a number of plant-affecting spells. Now, if you fashioned spears or wicker nets from it (at very moderate expense; only 50% more), then those would be individually capable of projecting small areas of entanglement. You could do worse than throwing them at people at the beginning of the encounter and then activating your spell to add punishment on top of an otherwise ordinary attack. The technique that has my endorsement, however, is using Wood Shape to turn a pile livewood timber (10 cubic feet +1/level) into a whole field of punji-sticks as a standard action, which would likely add some damaging upshot, and you could even carve out areas for your allies and you to stand safely in while you poke the enemy with big sticks. That's value! You would just need a good way to carry a lot of it around. Luckily, you're probably pretty good at making friends with horses. Plant Growth, used for overgrowth, probably has some good applicability here, too.
Less practically but more amusingly, Feather Tokens come in a 400 gp variety that instantly produce a fully-grown and ostensibly non-magical tree. The downsides are that it only works once and that the tree in question is an oak, the branches of which would be kind of high to reliably ensnare anything. One imagines you could have it made to create a weeping willow, instead, but 400gp a pop is probably an impractical cost, regardless.
Failing anything else, you could endeavor to discover and procure lightweight plants that can survive without much soil and just carry them around with you. I don't think throwing hydroponic tomatoes at people is a good way to
startWIN a fight, but with a little bit of notice you'd be able to prepare a battlefield with entanglement traps by setting up your shrubberies at choke-points or whatever.Something to keep in mind: The rules entry for entanglement discusses how an untethered snare could still inflict entanglement penalties; it just won't render its victim immobile outright. So, though you certainly would prefer some nice rooted plants, a detached trellis or layer of sod would still stand a chance at imparting some advantage.