Has this situation come up yesterday, and we were a bit unclear about timing's, and what could be done.

Martell Player declares a military challenge, using a character who has a poisoned knife attached. "after attached character declares stealth discard the bypassed character from play unless its controlled kneels 1 influence or pays 1 gold to the treasury" and stealth's past Ned.

The Stark player has lethal counterattack in hand, and two characters in play, Ned and the Hungry Mob. He has no gold and no standing influence.

Can he:

a.) not play the event, because Ned is discarded before he has an action window.

b.) use Ned to pay for the event, but have him discarded anyway, as well as the attacker being killed

c.) use Ned to pay for the event, and not have to discard him either, as the posioned knife and its wielder have left play.

I feel like it's a, but wasn't confident enough on the timing. Stark played was pretty annoyed as he had Power of Blood in play, AND Nymeria on Ned, neither of which were going to do him any good. We discussed it for a few minutes before remembering that the attacking character was the Red viper and was immune anyway, but still thought it was worth checking out for future reference.

Actually, a challenge goes this way:

1. Declare challenge type, target player and attackers (and kneel the attackers)
2. Player actions
3. Declare Stealth
4. Declare defenders (and kneel them)
5. Player actions
6. Resolve challenge

The Stark player can use Lethal Counterattack in 2, before Stealth is declared, kiling attackers and leaving no opportunity for Poisoned Knife (unless its bearer is saved or the event is cancelled) because it will have left play (and the challenge will end immediately (unresolved) if there are no participating characters).

However, if he waits until 5, Poisoned Knife will have resolved (because Lethal Counterattack is an action and Poisoned Knife's response resolves in step 5 of the framework action that includes 3 and 4) and Ned will have left play (unless he was saved), preventing the Stark player from paying the cost of Lethal Counterattack.

Keep in mind that assigning stealth and declaring/kneeling defenders are the same step. They are not independent from each other - any more than announcing challenge type and defending player are separate from declaring/kneeling attackers.

The important thing to realize for this question, though, is that assigning stealth (and therefore, the Poison Knife Response) comes just before defenders are declared, not just after attackers are declared (even though just about everyone acts like it does when they say "I attack with X, stealthing past Y"). Because of that, the defending player has a whole action window in which to do stuff before Poison Knife's Response even has the chance to trigger.

Good points - I think I had indeed forgotten (assuming I ever knew) that stealth came later than declaring the attackers.

Timing makes more sense now

thanks

Lets say the defender has only 2 Stark chars and he kneels them both to pay for the Lethal event. Do the attackers die right away, end of challenge with no result.

OR

Challenge keeps happening and it goes unopposed since he has no more standing chars and he loses somebody to claim, then the event kills the attackers?

AceManUSC said:

The event kills the attackers when it is played, not after the challenge resolves.

Like they mentioned earlier, if all the attackers were killed (no saves/immunities) then the challenge just ends without win/lose conditions ever occurring because there were no attackers participating, and it was before defenders were declared. Making it to where no one was participating in the challenge on either side.

The operative thing here is that there are no participating characters, so the challenge ends. It is not so much about having no attackers in general as it is about having no participating characters at all.

(The Stark player could have, for example, jumped Greatjon Umber into the challenge as a defender before playing Lethal Counterattack so that there would have been a participating character, even though there were no attackers and they hadn't gotten to the point of declaring defenders yet.)