Event

Tactic.

Cost: 1.

Guardian

Fast. Play when you activate the Fight ability on a Firearm asset.

Spend 1 additional ammo token from that asset. When you reveal chaos tokens for this attack, reveal 1 additional chaos token. Choose one to resolve and ignore the other.

David Demaret
Return to the Path to Carcosa #2.
"Eat lead!"

FAQs

No faqs yet for this card.

Reviews

Leo, non-parallel-back Skids, and Tony are probably the best users of this. It can easily guarantees a Double or Nothing shot, and they can spend the ammo from a Sleight of Hand'd gun and have ammo to spare too.

With taboos, the payoff isn't that good anymore, but at least you can still get an additional action or 3 resources.

suika · 9389

This one is playable.

Dump 1 extra ammo from something like .45 Thompson or an upgrade, from .32 Colt or it's upgrade, these weapons are rolling in ammo anyway. If you're making the attack at a decent value like +2 or +3 over the target difficulty, revealing and choosing from 2 tokens is a pretty safe bet for success.

The upgrade "Eat lead!" can spend extra ammo and reveal extra tokens, but why would you? (Actually, it can help you 1-shot a certain, large, monster, but that's a story for another day).

Freedom from is a boon in of itself and a reasonable pinch play when you're making a big attack with things like Lightning Gun or Vicious Blow, just cover the largest penalty in the bag and you get a guaranteed hit, this can be pretty useful in multiplayer.

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Unlike the 2xp version, this card is presentable, playable, it's still not a particularly good card, it's very specific and even so it will not as consistently score you successful attacks as, say, Lucky! would.

Finally, Diana Stanley has special interest in this card, as an "ignore" effect she can use it to power up.

Tsuruki23 · 2522
How does this trigger with Olive McBride? My guess is Olive would force you to reveal 3 tokens, but since you spent ammo to "reveal 1 additional chaos token", you would then reveal a 4th token. Then you would decide to resolve either 2 of the 3 Olive tokens or the 4th Eat Lead Token. Is that correct? — LaRoix · 1643

How does "Eat Lead!" affect your chances of success?

Using the standard difficulty Night of the Zealot chaos token pool:

+1, 0, 0, –1, –1, –1, –2, –2, –3, –4, skull, skull, hood, tablet, auto-fail, elder sign; with 1 ghoul at your location and assuming the elder sign gives at least +1

Here are the odds. For each, the numbers give your stat versus difficulty, percent chance of success without "Eat Lead!" --> percent chance with "Eat lead", relative risk reduction (how much it decreases chances of failing), absolute risk reduction (how often it makes a difference):

  1. 4+, 93.75% --> 100%, infinite (can't fail), 6.25%
  2. 3+, 87.5% --> 99.6%, 30, 12,1%
  3. 2+, 81.25% --> 97.5%, 7.5, 16.25%
  4. 1+, 62.5% --> 87.5%, 3, 25%
  5. 0, 25% --> 45%, 1.36, 20%
  6. -1, 12.5% --> 24.2%, 1.15, 11.7%

(Sorry about the error with the first post, my new analysis changes my impression significantly.)

As you can see, "Eat Lead!" decreases your chance of failing considerably, especially when you're already at a disadvantage. This means that if the penalty for failing is really bad, "Eat Lead!" can almost guarantee you don't get burned. However, the effect usually doesn't do anything, since the absolute risk reduction is never more than 25%. So the analysis confirms the intuition that the best use is for really bad penalties.

Is "Eat Lead!" worth using? I think most investigators won't use it, because they don't have extra bullets to spare. Personally, I also think that the chances of failing are part of the fun of the game and I don't like the uber chaos-bag manipulating strategy (e.g. Protective Incantation, Seal of the Seventh Sign. So I think I will only use this in versions of Diana Stanley that have firearms, since she also gets the resource/card/willpower bonus that puts the card over the top.

jmmeye3 · 620
Wait, how can you fail if you are at +4? — trazoM · 9
That would be my question as well. — Soemann · 1
(First time writing a comment and immediately muck it up by pressing enter too early. -.-) In addition to my previous comment: If I understand 'Eat Lead' correctly, you would reveal both tokens at the same time, not draw one, put it back and reveal a second one. That means at +4 with 'Eat lead' you would succeed at 100%, since you could only fail by auto-fail token, which you could then ignore. At +3 chances would be 14/16 (87.5%) to succeed without 'Eat Lead' and 99.2% with (2/16*1/15 to fail). — Soemann · 1
Whoops, that’s right thank you. I will see if I can edit the review. — jmmeye3 · 620
This is very similar to "rolling with advantage" in d&d, which is a decent enough deal. If you look in reverse at the fail chances, you go from 18.75% down to 2.5%, from 38% to 13%. The -1 — Mataza · 19