Newbie question about 'Deadly'

By BrooklynMike, in 2. AGoT Rules Discussion

Apologies if this turns out to be a dumb question:

As I read it, if the attacker has more Deadly characters he is allowed to kill a participating defender after the struggle resolves.

So, if I attack in a Military struggle with a Deadly character and the defender puts up characters to defend and for some reason loses, then I get to resolve the challenge (so the defender kills a character) and then kill an additional participating character? In essence, kill an extra character?

If so, what happens if the defender decides to kill a lone defending character in the resolution, does that mean that the Deadly has no effect because there are no participating defenders?

BrooklynMike said:

As I read it, if the attacker has more Deadly characters he is allowed to kill a participating defender after the struggle resolves.

Close, but notice that it is the defending player who chooses and kills the character. The attacking player does not get to choose to kill the best participating defender; the defending player gets to choose to kill the worst participating defender.

BrooklynMike said:

So, if I attack in a Military struggle with a Deadly character and the defender puts up characters to defend and for some reason loses, then I get to resolve the challenge (so the defender kills a character) and then kill an additional participating character? In essence, kill an extra character?

If so, what happens if the defender decides to kill a lone defending character in the resolution, does that mean that the Deadly has no effect because there are no participating defenders?

Couple of things here:

- If the attacker has more participating Deadly character than the defender, a defending character is killed whether the attacker wins the challenge or not. So while you are correct in your scenario that the defender could end up killing a character for claim and a character for Deadly (total of 2 characters) if they lose, they'd also have to kill a participating character for Deadly even if they won.

- Deadly can only kill participating characters and claim is always resolved first (before anything else, including Responses). So in a military challenge, I can defend against your Deadly challenge with one character, choose to kill it for claim, and leave no legal targets for Deadly.

- Because of that, Deadly tends to be more significant in intrigue and power challenges than in military.

Thank you so much. I'm just at that point in the learning curve where I'm discovering the advantages of sequencing my challenges and mixing in Deadly and Stealth to overbalance them in my favor.

BrooklynMike said:

I'm just at that point in the learning curve where I'm discovering the advantages of sequencing my challenges and mixing in Deadly and Stealth to overbalance them in my favor.

Friendly rule of thumb; doing an intrigue challenge you can win first is usually a good plan. Get rid of cards in their hand that they might otherwise end up using against you.