I´m always looking for alternative and/or additional rules for melee formats to make gameplay a little more interactive. Well, i lately came up with the idea of making prisoners and would like to know how you like the idea and how it can be improved.

The basic idea is that we see a lot of hostages/ prisoners and wards are made in the books, this cirsumstance doesn´t seem to be reflected in the books. Of course you can steal charachters, but if you are making a prisoner in war the charachter wouldn´t work for you, but will possibly rot in a prison. Stolen charachters are different, because their abilities can be used, so they feel a little more like these charachters took bribes.

Rules:

• Every player should recveive 3 x Prisoner of war cards (5KE) this cards are just used as indicators, so they aren´t considered to be in play. You could say this cards are cells for your prisoners. You´ll maybe want to use dungeon cards, sky cells or whatever too for style reasons instead.
• Every time you win a military challenge you may take one charachter chosen for military claim as your prisoner and place it beneath one of your cell cards. You aren´t allowed to take a prisoner when every cell you control already contains a prisoner. And you can´t take army charachters as a prisoner.
• A prisoners is considered to be out of play (except for purposes of uniqueness) , so it´s gametext and strength can´t be used.
• Duing the dominance phase your prisoners add their strength to your total dominance strength. If you win the dominance phase you may take one power for every unique prisoner from the owner of the prisoner.
• If you win an intrigue or power challenge against an opponent, you may choose to free a prisoner instead of the normal claim. If you win both (intrigue and power) challenges against an opponent you may choose to free an additional prisoner.

So what do you think? Is it a viable concept to improve melee games or is it a lackluster ?

Looks interesting. I like the choices it offers: do I kill your character, or imprison it in the hopes of stealing your power later? Do I resolve Power claim, or free my hostage? Does the hostage come back knelt or standing? It might make a good way to recover a character to then use in a challenge.

Format looks interesting. Could be fun to experiment with this format. Do you guys play with the titles like normal Melee?

Hey, that looks like a lot of fun. I think with a little tightening up, it could be a really great alternate melee variant. I'll see if our group wants to give it a try and I'll let you know how it goes! Thanks for sharing.

I really like this, but I do think there could be some additional options. Like, can you kill your prisoners? and if you do, what are the consequences, if any? Can you exchange prisoners? This seems like it would be really awesome for multiplayer, and can you imagine the scenarios? Player A to Player B "Hey, I'll give you back your Jaime if you kill Player C's Robb that you took prisoner." Also, I think that it should be limited to Unique characters. I don't think its going to be that awesome to take the Stormlands Peasant hostage. I mean who's going to pay ransom for that guy? Also, this might even work for joust as well.

Thank you all for your comments and input.

JerusalemJones said:

To be honest I forgot to add what "free a hostage" means, my original intention was to let the player choose between 3 options:

• take the prisoner as your own captive
• bring it knelt into play under it´s owner´s control
• kill the prisoner or shuffle it back into it´s owners deck (well that´s 4 options to be honest)

kpmccoy21 said:

We haven´t had the chance to try the format already, however i would recommend to play with the titles.

Staton said:

It could make sense to kill and/ or exchange prisoners.

I think it would be good to limit the ability to kill a prisoner to once per round. I don´t think that it should have any other consequences than that the imprisoned charachter is put into the dead pile, otherwise the choice between killing a charachter for military or imprison it, wouldn´t really be a choice if you get a whole lot of funky effects for killing a prisoner later. Taking a prisoner should have a benefit on the one hand (additional power for domiannce and the power grab ability) and a risk on the other hand (possibly negating the military claim).

I like the idea of exchanging prisoners, this action could be limited to the marshalling phase and you may only exchange one prisoner with a player. per round. Also a ransom should be paid in gold tokens, being half the gold value (minimum) 1 of the printed gold cost of that charachter. This might add the cool options you mentioned without becoming quickly out of hand.

And you are right about the non- uniques, it doesn´t make much sense for a refugee charachter to be imprisoned from a story view, but i guess it makes gameplay a little more elegant (also the fact that non-uniques only count for dominance strength reflect the true value of uniques in my opinion). But once again, that´s just in theory, if your playgroup uses a lot of uniques it could make sense and be a little more nedly to allow only uniques to be imprisoned.

Like, can you kill your prisoners? and if you do, what are the consequences, if any?

A consequence could be that you have to discard a power from a card you control.

Would remind me a bit about what happened in the third book.

hmmm good point there on the nonuniques not getting you power. I think that's a pretty fair trade off. and also genius on the ransom! I really like that idea! I think this has to be one of the most origional melee formats ever. Congrats Old Ben! We'll have to try it soon.