A brief summary of Nighthawks rules. You don’t need to learn any of this in advance, what you need to know is printed on your character cards, and we’ll explain everything in play as well.
DIRECTOR’S CUT VERSION 0.3
Combat Missions
Missions are short and fast, and played a bit like a choose your own adventure. The important bit is how they affect your characters, and their goals – not the details of what happened. It all happens too fast to remember it all
Expect to be making choices on what you’re doing with only 10 seconds to decide and only able to discuss with those your character can immediately talk to. We’ll relax the timing a little on the first mission while you learn.
Skills
Your character has skills in Navigation, Marine and Piloting. The basic idea is “if you have enough, you succeed”. 2 is a competent professional skill level, 3 is exceptionally good, any challenge with a difficulty higher than 3 is “are you nuts?” to a normal person.
Wounds
You can gain Wounds when that’s the logical consequence of your actions or of pushing your luck. Each Wound you have reduces all your skills by 1. A third Wound leaves you incapacitated and dying without urgent medical attention. Wounds are healed in the medical bay.
Pushing Your Luck
If you want to do something you don’t have enough skill for, you can Push Your Luck. You draw from a deck of cards which is half “+1”, and half Consequence. Consequences are based on what you were doing. E.g. you might get wounded, damage the ship, become stressed, etc. You can Push Your Luck multiple times on the same challenge if you like – but consequences accumulate. Pushing Your Luck CAN potentially kill you if you’re wounded enough – it’s designed to be the only way to die in game.
Guts
Guts cards represent your ability to keep going under fire, your ability to withstand combat stress. You must discard a Guts card when the group comes under fire, and losing Guts may be a Consequence of Pushing Your Luck.
When you have no Guts cards left you should roleplay the effects of combat stress.
If you have no Guts cards, then when you Push Your Luck you are Reckless. You must draw twice for every attempt and apply both cards. This can make you exceptionally heroic, or possibly exceptionally dead.
You can regain a Guts card when you confess a significant secret to another character between missions, as well as in the Thumbs Up/Down round.
Command Crew
The Command Crew don’t go on the missions – instead they will receive the new starchart, list of distress calls, and plan how to manage the ships fuel, engineering, sickbay and supplies.
The Acts
Most of the time in the game is during the Acts, in between the missions.
This is social roleplay – some characters have special abilities during the Acts, the results of these are roleplayed and have a fair bit of scope for interpretation by whoever is targeted.
No/minimal physical contact is needed. Characters may conflict physically, but it should be roleplayed without contact.
Jones
The GM is playing Petty Officer Jones. Don’t call them Sir, they work for a living! Any time you want to check something with the GM, you can just ask Jones “Mr Jones, can I check something with you?” or similar. This is to allow you to ask OOC questions without breaking game flow too much. You can also ask Jones IC questions if you like, they have been on the ship for a long time.
End of Act
Five minutes before the end of the Act, Jones will announce that the Charys is reaching launch point for the next mission. At the end of Act, the GM will say “Cut!”, and roleplay should stop while we get ready to transition into the next mission segment.
Combat missions are horribly stressful, and most of you have had hard lives even before you got to the Charys. Having support from those around you is important. So at the end of the Act, we’ll check in how your character is feeling about that.
Did your character feel supported, among friends, helped, listened to? Was someone there for you? If so – you can give a Thumbs Up at the end of Act.
Did your character feel alienated, attacked, questioned, isolated, an outsider? If so, you can give a Thumbs down at the end of Act.
- Those who give Thumbs Up can take a Guts card.
- Those who give Thumbs Down don’t get one – these are the people you should notice are suffering the most from the stress of the situation.
- Some people have powers that trigger during the End of Act Transition. This happens before Mission Start triggers if you have those
Conflict on the Charys
Conflict between others, social or physical should just be roleplayed. Generally speaking, whoever has the most dangerous weapon, or the most people on their side wins. The target of aggression decides what the effect is.
Captain Fisk controls the (unseen) crew and is assumed to always have two people nearby who will back him up on the flight deck – you might expect Fisk to always have backup.
Special Cards
If you see someone show a card with the Special back to the GM or another player, you can later quietly ask them “what did I see when you did …. ?” – and they’ll tell you. The italic text on the card gives them a hint what you might see.