| Kevin Martin 185 |
How are you doing it in a week? You can only recharge one charge a day on the staff. It's a week and a half to fully recharge the staff. It's also only a good investment if you have copious downtime and do this repeatedly. Your up-front cost is ~12k. You need at least six castings to make it worth more than just casting the spell Awaken. Those six castings will take 12 days to make the staff and 50 days to recharge. That's a two month investment before it begins paying dividends. If we go with your suggested three at a time, if they ever wipe you're going to need to spend three weeks (20 days) replacing all of them. And that's assuming you burn a fifth level slot every day until your staff is fully powered. Staff recharge is done when preparing spells so you can't choose to use unused slots at the end of the day, you have to give it up from the start.
Plant Growth has the line "This spell has no effect on plant creatures." Even if it didn't, it doesn't make them bigger. It increases productivity or causes them to be overgrown, not bigger. It's less Enlarge Person and more Enlarge Hair.
Diplomacy "be my bodyguard" is only as effective as the GM will let it be. Specifically "unless the request is against its nature or puts it in serious peril." Command Plants doesn't actually help you much here, it's just Charm Person for plants. If you want to force an order it's an opposed Charisma check, something most Druids skip. The one you need for total control is Control Plants, but it's an 8th level spell and lasts minutes/level.
Also, I'm not entirely sure, but I think custom staves still require GM permission (like other custom magic items) and your staff of "make this spell cheap so I can spam it" may not pass.
It's a great staff for Kingmaker. You'll have a tree horde in no time. For most other campaigns? Really depends on how much free time you get. As I said, you need at least six castings to make it worth it and each casting after the first requires 10 days of a fifth level spell slot. If you're...
I noticed I did have my timeline a little messed up after I posted. I forgot about the 1 charge per day for the staff. I did mis-interpret plant growth, I saw that it was the "opposite" of diminish plant which reduces the size by a 1/3 so reading between the lines a bit I would think of it as maybe a 30% increase in size. Not being able to use on plant creatures makes it irrelevant.
The whole idea of this came up when in a campaign I'm playing when the party spends time in a town doing crafting whatnots I had something to do. I was originally thinking of tree farming for some extra $, and thought a Treant Guardian would be a cool way to spend the time once every 10 days of course.
The staff would also come in beneficial for any wildlife you would like to tame as well. The "Treant" wouldn't be much of a pc/npc but more of a role play "shock" troop or deterrent to protect previously acquired land. I even thought of making it a "trap" of sorts that it would remain uncast until city under siege a trusted npc would hit the Panic button and a tree would come to life and help defend.
The party in that campaign is level 10 and I was just looking for something interesting to do in downtime as I didn't take any crafting feats.