Race redesign idea: Nagas are loooooong

The basic idea behind this redesign is to remove the slowness (or at least some of it) from Nagas and instead make naga occupy two square, one for their torso and one for their tail. Slowness is a kind boring mechanic and incredibly limiting and punishing. This redesign still needs a lot of more specifics but here is the gist of the idea.

Tail mechanics:

The tail behaves similarly to other multi-part monsters like kraken (it shares a common HP pool with the torso, shares resistances, etc). It occupies the pervious space that the naga moved through. The naga’s tail has a high and naturally increasing AC from its scales (probably starting at +6 and gradually increasing with levels to something like +10) but they only benefit AC wise from barding. Armor effects are resistances impact both the torso and tail (because magic affects the whole creature). The tail gets a natural EV benefit (+4 maybe?) but doesn’t benefit from shields. Cloud attacks could impact the naga twice. Other non-cloud AOE attacks like Fireball would impact only once but can hit either square.

The other aspects of this redesign are adding Rear Up and Strike as two natural abilities that replace Spit Poison (which is a relatively uninteresting power which quickly become pointless). Rear up uses an entire turn worth of movement but it has the naga raise itself up and bring it tail in closer. This reduces the naga to only occupying one square and hides the tail. The second move is Strike, which can only be done when a naga has Reared Up and allows the naga to launch itself in a straight line up to 5 squares or until it collides with a monster, dealing bonus damage with melee weapons if it does collide. At the end of a Strike, the naga occupies two squares again and can’t Strike again for 5 turns (though they can Rear Up). These values shouldn’t allow a naga to indefinitely kite an enemy by rearing and striking over and over again but would allow them to do some kiting if they are willing to take damage.

Why are tails an interesting downside to a species?

First, while early on the tail is a strong point on the naga but gradually becomes a weak spot on more melee focused players as armor and shields improve. At low levels, the AC is high enough that maybe a smart Naga could even use their tail as a barrier and fight with a weapon with reach. Second, being two squares in size can significantly increase the number of melee attacks you can take per turn when surrounded (two or four more depending on direction of movement). Third, in tight corridors, a monster can attack you but you can’t attack them without reach, swapping squares with your tail or Rearing Up. Fourth, tails can remain in sight of an enemy with ranged attacks when you aren’t. Finally, clouds are much more dangerous and hard to navigate and AOE attack are more likely to hit you.

Overall, tails I think are a major strategic downside but I also think Naga’s would be interesting to play. With the “Rear Up” and “Strike” mechanic, Nagas need to be very strategic in their movement but aren’t as stationary are they currently are with their slow movement. There are a lot of strategic decisions to make (“do I waste a turn rearing up or do I continue to fight with the tail behind me”, “Do I strike to reposition myself and risk having my tail exposed or remain in the fight”). The burst of rapid movement would work well with spell casters and other ranged attackers (especially with spells that make enemy movement slow or dangerous).

Implementation wise, I have not idea how hard this would be but my hope was that existing mechanics for multi-part monsters would have already solved a bunch of these problems.

Thoughts?

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I want to give it more consideration but also wanted to share my initial thoughts:

Overall I like the idea. I would test it if there was an experimental branch!

Firstly I like the niche Naga fills already of slow beefy creature with stealth and spit to help it out in the early game. I wouldn’t want that to go away. If this was adopted I would want it or the old naga to have a different theme so they can coexist.

I don’t know how difficult it would be to implement (kraken tentacle code is notorious but this is a lot simpler, it doesn’t have to go underwater or connect to more than 1 other segment). I do think that the tail having different defenses is strange and I’m not sure how the interface would display this info.

That the tail can occupy the same space solves some issues with (like “where do you put the tail if you go downstairs or teleport”) so that’s nice.

I am interested in the strike ability. I think it may be too similar to Ba’s hop ability or Ru’s leap (both have significant cool downs and both come bundled with significant sacrifices and Ru’s cooldown is shared with other powerful Ru abilities). It should probably only be able to target monsters. That would make it similar to other abilities such as blinkbolt or piledriver though it would take two turns to execute which would limit it’s usefulness (which seems like a good thing to me?). A short range controlled blink would be too much I think.

I’m not sure how much of a downside occupying multiple tiles is if you can easily stop occupying multiple tiles. Maybe it should be more difficult, take more turns, or maybe Na should still be a little slow, I dunno. I would have to give it some more thought. In the current state it sounds like “rear up” is a thing you start almost every fight with.

This is great feedback!

Your point on Strike being too powerful is probably very true. As I was writing it I started realizing it was very strong. I think it would be solved by both your suggestions of making Rear Up take longer and making it only able to target enemies. Another alternative which I considered is get rid of Strike entirely and make Rear Up something like Curl up. Curling up would take time to setup but would also take time to Uncurl if you want to move, effectively making you forced to be stationary. I kind of like the thematic elements of a snake strike but it could be captured in other ways (like making all weapons effectively have reach) or just removed. Or just remove both Strike and Rear up and nagas are just permanently long but only occupy one square when the come down stairs because the tail is still in the stairwell.

On the UX/visualization side of things, I was trying to keep it relatively simple by just having two key differences (AC and EV). If simplifying that to just one change (just AC) would help, then that could be an option. The EV thing was there to compensate for shields not working on the tail but maybe the natural AC is enough.

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