Steel Coils, a upgrade for the Mistress of serpents for 20 conquest, gives all your Nagas the Constrict ability.

original Text:

Constrict: Instead of attacking, a figure with Constrict may elect to squeeze one enemy figure that it has Grappled. The constricting figure simply spends all of its remaining movement points for the turn and rolls a black power die for each movement point spent. For each blank or power enhancement rolled, the enemy figure loses 1 wound (ignoring armor). Surges rolled have no effekt.

Am i mistaken, or is steel coils total useless?

Well, it ignores armor...

Looks like if a normal naga happens to already be adjacent to the hero it wants to hurt when it activates, steel coils does more wounds than a normal attack (on average) if the hero has at least 5/7/7/8 armor for copper/silver/gold/diamond nagas. (The thresholds are much higher for master nagas.) It also lets you get past shields, though if any other monsters attack that hero the same turn, that probably doesn't matter. On the down side, you don't generate threat from surges.

Um, it lets you pretend that a "Charge" card is actually a "Rage" card (under highly specific circumstances)...

So I guess there exist situations in which it could be marginally useful (mostly if you were using copper nagas at higher campaign levels...yet still paid 20 xp for this upgrade..?), but as a rule-of-thumb, yeah, I'd say it's useless. Even if you could roll dice equal to your speed without actually sacrificing any movement points, and you were going to be adjacent to your target anyway, it would rarely be better than attacking.

Unless anyone can think of a way to get your nagas lots of extra movement points..?

My first thought would be to let them do this in addition to attacking, since nagas are big and slow and this costs movement points, but I haven't played RtL, so I have very little idea how that would change things.

Nagas are too slow for this to be useful (3 or 4 MP) and already have a powerful magic attack. Unless SOB lets you use two surges for an extra point of movement in all cases (only encounters in RTL, which don't exist in SoB) I can't see why anyone would want to buy this thing.

SamVimes said:

You mean two threat ? Two surges for a movement point would be possible, but a bit odd.

Yeah, I mean threat.

The fact that this "upgrade" happens instead of attacking seems likely to be a mistake. In dungeon level #20 of Road to Legend ("Two by Two"), the leader is Malem the Destroyer. He has a special ability as follows: "The overlord may, at the start of his turn, choose one hero who Malem has grappled. That hero suffers 2 wounds, ignoring armor. For 20 XP, I would definitely want this "upgrade" to be in addition to , not instead of the attack, or I would absolutely never waste 20 XP on it. That makes no sense. It has to be a mistake, in my opinion. Perhaps it can be corrected in a FAQ or with a re-issued skill card.

Although there is one other advantage in that the constrict attack would never miss. For that to be useful, in proportion to the expense of 20 XP, it seems appropriate that a grappled/constricted hero would also be unable to attack . How exactly are you going to attack if you are in the coils of a giant snake? That might make a good house rule, at least.

Schmiegel said:

Sure it would. You can still roll all surges. That's less likely than rolling an X (unless you've only got 1 move left), but it's definitely not the same as automatic damage.

Schmiegel said:

Absolutely not. If a lucky naga (or group of nagas) manages to grapple the entire team of heroes, that should not mean that the heroes wait there, powerless, while the overlord collects cards and threat for about 20 turns and then kills them all simultaneously. They specifically errata'd the pit LOS rules to ensure that heroes would always be able to attack the monster that was grappling them, and for good reason. Even a swallowed hero is still allowed to fight back (albeit at reduced effectiveness), and that specifically can't happen to more than one hero at a time.

It's pretty useless and certainly not worth 20 Conquest. The Naga has to survive first and being a big target it's hard for it to hide behind a convenient piece of rubble. Then it has to get to a hero - so unless it got attacked by a melee hero, you wasting MPs just getting there and each MP is one less dice to roll.

Ignoring armour is nice, but unless you've ground the party tank down already, you'll be out in the open and will get peppered in the counterattack.

If this power was attack and constrict it would be more worthwhile but 20 XP for an upgrade to a relatively rare monster (and the avatar battle)... I think I can pass.

Fancy giving some more details about Sea of Blood. Are the non-speciliased Avatar upgrades the same?

Well, I'm not talking about a hero being merely grappled, but both grappled and in a "constrict attack". What do you think you should get for your 20 XP? And what are the odds of an entire party of heroes being grappled and in "constrict" mode all at the same time? If the entire party is stupid enough to get themselves in that position, they deserve whatever fate they get. I'm just trying to find a way to get some mileage out of the 20 XP expense, which is a considerable one. Antistone, I know you don't play Road to Legend, but "absolutely not" is a bit severe. Better to just leave the card sitting in the box and never used I guess, in your opinion, because that's what's going to happen. At least it will remain in mint condition.

Yes, having no card at all is better than having a broken card. Hands down. Though that's hardly the only option.

You could minimize the chances of breaking the game by layering successively narrower conditions on when, exactly, it can actually be activated, but that's just going to give you something like Ghost: usually irrelevant, but breaks the game under special conditions. That's bad ability design. It adds very little to the game, occasionally does very bad things to the game, and gives you an additional thing to keep track of: a net loss.

Adding the restriction that you have to specifically be targeted by constriction (rather than just grappled) is also bad because it's ambiguous without additional rules text, and it adds an extra thing you have to keep track of (at least whether you're grappled or not is something you can tell just by looking at the board, rather than something you have to remember). Not insurmountable obstacles, certainly, but not points in its favor, either.

Maybe there's another upgrade card that gives Naga more movement? Sounds like this Mistress of Serpents is a naga Avatar so I wouldn't be surprised if there were several naga-upgrading cards available.