House of Cards: Thunderous Blow

This is another action card, Thunderous Blow. Thunderous Blow requires a great weapon. This is the reason for the shift to using great weapon stats for all the actions as this will allow comparisons between them.

Action Card

Conservative			Reckless
1 success	base damage		1 success	base damage
3 successes	D +1 critical		2 successes	D +1 critical
2 boons	+1 critical		1 boon	+1 critical
2 boons#	+1 critical		2 boons#	+1 critical
-2 boons	1 fatigue		-1 boon	1 fatigue
-2 boons*	1 fatigue		-2 boons*	1 fatigue
			1 comet	+7 dam
			1 chaos	delay this attack

# from the Critical Rating of the weapon
* all physical actions have this as a possible result so it isn’t listed on the card

Assumptions

Comet use
On the conservative side comet priority was: increase 0 successes to 1 > +1 critical
On the reckless side comet priority was: increase 0 successes to 1 > comet line

Results: Thunderous Blow 

House of Cards: Reckless Cleave in Warhammer 3rd

Having already generated the dice pools to analyze Troll-Feller Strike I figured I might as well see what would happen if I applied those results to a different action card, Reckless Cleave.

Weapon Change

For reasons that will become apparent in future articles I chose to switch the base weapon for the simulation. Instead of using 5 strength and a hand weapon I used 5 strength and a great weapon giving a base damage of 12 and a Critical Rating of 2. For those unfamiliar, a Critical Rating is the cost in boons for any attack made with that weapon to generate a critical hit, as will be seen in the card description.

Action Card

Here are the available results for Reckless Cleave

Conservative			Reckless
1 success	base damage +2		1 success	base damage +1
			3 successes	D +3
2 boons	+Str^ dam, delay this card		1 boon	+Str^ dam, delay this card
2 boons#	+1 critical		2 boons#	+1 critical
-1 boon	-1 soak		-1 boon	-1 soak
-2 boons*	1 fatigue		-2 boons*	1 fatigue
			1 comet	+2 critical
1 chaos	delay defense		1 chaos	delay defense

^ assumed to be 5 for this example
# from the Critical Rating of the weapon
* all physical actions have this as a possible result so it isn’t listed on the card

Assumptions