Complete Guide to the Nature Skill in D&D 5e
As one of the Intelligence based knowledge skills, Nature is frequently seen as unimportant and difficult to see much use out of. At face value, this is definitely true. The main uses listed for the Nature skill is to gather information about plants and animals, understand ecosystems, identify potentially dangerous plants such as poisonous ones, or potentially predict the weather. The other big potential use not listed there is harvesting poisons, so let’s knock out the smaller uses for this skill before we tackle that subject.
Using Nature to Gather Information
Nature can provide us information on plants and animals, including ones that you may potentially fight. This could inform you of the strengths and weaknesses of those monsters, or even ways to negotiate avoiding fighting them entirely. Do note that negotiations with beasts will fall under Animal Handling, but Nature could tell you the best method.
The other issue is that plant and beast encounters really only exist at very low tier play, so you’ll see this come up less as you level up. General information about your natural environment could come up, such as trying to find the nearest water source, but note that we are starting to tread on Survival’s toes now.
The other big issue with this spell that the two classes you would expect to be good at it, Druids and Rangers, are both Wisdom based, and this skill works off of Intelligence. Wizards and Artificers aren’t super keen to take a skill like this, especially if this is all it can do. Thankfully, there is a niche use for Nature that might convince a few of you to give it a shot.
Using Nature to Harvest Poisons
The DMG has specific rules for harvesting poisons:
DMG page 257:
“A character can instead attempt to harvest poison from a poisonous creature such as a snake, wyvern, or carrion crawler. The creature must be incapacitated or dead, and the harvesting requires 1d6 minutes followed by a DC 20 Intelligence (Nature) check. (Proficiency with the poisoner’s kit applies to this check if the character doesn’t have proficiency in Nature.) On a successful check, the character harvests enough poison for a single dose. On a failed check, the character is unable to extract any poison. If the character fails the check by 5 or more, the character is subjected to the creature’s poison.”
I’m genuinely proud of the designers for this one, we rarely get rules as clear and helpful as this. There are still a few open questions, but we’ll get to that. So if we kill or incapacitate a creature that uses poisons, we can spend a few minutes and make a DC 20 Nature check to harvest one vial of their poison. The effect of this poison is actually very easy to determine, no matter what creature you harvested from. Simply copy whatever the poison did in the stat block of the monster. If the poison added 2d6 poison damage to their attacks, that poison deals 2d6 damage.
Use your best judgment to determine the nature of the poison (contact, injury, injection, inhalation), and just try to match up with how the monster inflicts it. This is really useful, as there is a lot of poisonous creatures in this game. Some simply do damage like Wyverns (7d6) or Purple Wurms (12d6), and others can completely paralyze opponents like Carrion Crawler Mucus.
The issue is that a DC 20 check is pretty tough, so how do we mitigate that? Well first off, Nature isn’t actually the only thing we can use to harvest poisons. A Poisoner’s Kit and proficiency in it can substitute, but if you have both, you get advantage on the check according to the rules for tools in Xanathar’s Guide. Spells like Guidance and our allies using the Help action can also give a boost. It’s important to make sure we don’t fail this check, as we seem to be able to harvest multiple doses as long as we continue to succeed. One failure stops our process completely for that creature, and failing by too much could be disastrous. The Poisoner feat does allow you to ignore that last part, but many will find it difficult to fit that feat onto their sheet.
Also, yes poisons are commonly resisted, but that’s no reason to not use them in fights where they aren’t. Even if 90% of creatures you fight are immune to poison, that just means you get to save up your stock to decimate that other 10%. Poisons also take an action to apply to a weapon or ammunition, so make sure you and your allies have their armaments pre-poisoned before combat begins whenever possible. A custom made scabbard for the Fighter’s Greatsword that can hold poison so the blade is coated every time it is drawn shouldn’t be too tough to make with some various tool proficiencies.
So are poisons enough of a reason for you to take Nature proficiency? In my opinion, yes, at least for one member of your party. You definitely don’t need any more than one person, though if you can’t get Poisoner’s Kit proficiency and your DM rules that your helping ally also needs proficiency in the skill they are helping with, that could be a legitimate reason for two people to have this. Outside of that, just have the person with the highest Intelligence grab this and enjoy the steady stream of extra free damage it provides. Not many skills can equate to real damage, so take advantage of this one.
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