Dissecting the 5E D&D Plant Creature Type

February 10, 2022

Salutations, nerds! Everybody who plays fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons has probably adventured in the forest at one point or another. It’s a staple fantasy backdrop. And what does a forest have in abundance? Plants. Trees, underbrush, bushes, briars — all sorts of things that grow. Even if you’re not in the forest there’s still farmland with crops and that one dandelion poking through the sidewalk in the city yelling, “Yeah, cobblestone!” But sometimes the plants turn around and want to kill you, and today’s post is about those 5E D&D plant creature types.

An awakened tree asks for company on a long walk, telling tales and revealing much along the way through Walk in the Woods, one of our Out of the Box encounters. Click the image to check it out along with 54 other dynamic encounters ready to drop right into your games.

Plant creatures in 5E D&D

What is a plant in the 5E D&D sense? We’re talking about plant monsters. They’re the ones that move and spit spores at you. The dandelion poking through the cobblestone isn’t a plant creature. (Unless it starts whipping around trying to stab your ankles, anyway.) Plant creatures move, maybe even have a movement speed, are aware of themselves and have their own health bars.

But more or less they’re probably exactly what you’re imagining. Plants, but trying to kill you.

“Plants in this context are vegetable creatures, not ordinary flora. Most of them are ambulatory, and some are carnivorous. The quintessential plants are the shambling mound and the treant. Fungal creatures such as the gas spore and the myconid also fall into this category.” — from the 5E D&D Monster Manual

Things Plants Do

Plants can do a lot of things. There are plants that rake you with your branches, plants that release spores to slap you with status effects, plants that spit needles at you, plants that rot you with necrotic damage and even one that screams. Shriekers are good watch dogs.

The point a lot that falls under the umbrella of things plants do. Their skill sets don’t unite them but their photosynthesis does. Well, no, I guess Underdark mushrooms don’t get any light. Um.

“You know what, I’ll get back to you on that,” they lied.

Five Plants of Note

Awakened Tree. A tree with a walking speed of 20 feet and an Intelligence of 10. A tree that can and will smack you with its branches.
Blight. Lots of different kinds of these. But honestly they’re awakened plants with a bad attitude. Since there are different variants of them they make good minions for your dark druid.
Myconid. Throws spores all over the place. Mushroom people! They wilt in the sun but tend to be pretty chill unless you take the fight to them.
Shrieker. Underdark mushroom often used by the drow to guard their homes. If you pass within 30 feet of one it just starts screaming, much like my two month old son who is also challenge rating 0.
Treant. Probably awakened the awakened tree up there. Big bad tree dad. Throws rocks, tears down walls, cannot be distinguished from a normal tree if it isn’t moving.