The frontier does not care how fast you think you are. Out here, a gunfight is settled by three things: where you stand, what you are holding, and what you are willing to spend. High Noon RPG is a game of exactly those three things. Pull up a chair. The Dealer is about to deal you in.
What This Game Is
High Noon RPG is a tabletop roleplaying game built on the High Noon skirmish engine. You control a single character, not a whole posse, and you carry that character through a campaign run by a game master called the Dealer. Combat plays out on a grid of tiles using a deck of cards and a stack of chips. Everything between the gunfights, the investigations, the deals, the double-crosses, plays out in conversation with the Dealer.
If you have played the High Noon board game, most of this will feel like home. The turn structure, the grid, the combat math, the loot, all of it carries over. What the RPG adds is a character who grows: a point-buy build, a leveling track, a spendable chip economy, and a world that reacts to what you do.
The Three Pillars
- ◆Position. There is no diagonal movement and no shooting through your enemies. Where you stand decides what you can see, what you can hit, and what cover you get. A good position wins fights before a card is ever played.
- ◆Cards. Your character builds a deck and draws a small hand of four cards from it. Every card has an Attack value and a Defend value. You play cards to attack, to defend, and to pass skill checks. The same hand drives your gunfights and your poker face.
- ◆Chips. Chips are what you spend to bend the odds. Ante up an Attack chip to hit harder, a Speed chip to move farther, a Draw chip to dig for the card you need. Spend them and they are gone until you rest.
Resolution: Play a Card, Add Your Modifiers
When you attempt something uncertain, you play a card from your hand and add your modifiers to its value. Your modifiers come from your stats, your gear, your faction, and any chips you choose to spend. Compare the total to the target number the Dealer sets. Meet it or beat it and you succeed.
Card value + relevant stat + other modifiers vs. the target number. Example: to lift a fallen beam, you play a card worth 5, add your Tough of 3, add a 2 from a helping hand. Total 10. If the Dealer set the target at 10, the beam moves.
When you act against another character, a grapple, a stare-down, a race to the draw, it is an opposed check. Both of you play a card and add your modifiers. The higher total wins. High Noon never asks you to roll a die. The deck is your fortune, and you decide how much of it to risk.
The Two Kinds of Chips
High Noon uses chips for two very different jobs, and it is worth knowing the difference before your first session so you never mix them up at the table.
| Chip | Size | Job | Example |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tracker chips | Small (half inch) | Track the state of things | Red marks your health, blue marks used cards and equipped gear, green marks poison and map effects |
| RPG chips | Large (poker size) | Spent to boost your plays | Ante up Attack, Defense, Speed, Range, Action, or Draw to bend a moment your way |
The base game only ever used chips to keep track of things. The RPG adds a second kind of chip you actually spend. To keep them straight, the spendable RPG chips are made large, the size of real poker chips, while the trackers stay small. If it is big, you spend it. If it is small, it is keeping score.
Ante Up
You buy your chips when you build your character and again each time you level. During combat you may ante up, spending chips to strengthen a play: add to an attack, buy an extra action, extend your range, or draw more cards. Chips spent in combat are gone. They do not come back until the next day in the story, when your character has had a chance to rest.
Every chip is a bet against tomorrow. Empty your stack to win the gunfight in front of you and you ride into the next one with nothing left to spend. The best gunslingers are not the ones who spend the most. They are the ones who know which fight is worth the chips.
Your Hand of Four
You build a deck, but you never hold all of it. You draw a hand of four cards and that is what you work with. Four is your ceiling. Out on the trail, between fights, you spend cards from this hand to pass skill checks and overcome challenges, holding what is left until you need it.
When a fight breaks out, you first draw back up to a full hand of four, then the guns come out. You keep playing cards from your hand until the fight ends or your hand runs dry. Manage it well. A hand of four is not much, and the frontier does not wait for you to shuffle.
Draw four cards to start. Four is the max hand in the RPG, not the twelve of the board game. Hold your hand through play, spend cards on checks and combat, and top back up to four when a fight begins.
A Turn at a Glance
Combat runs in rounds, and each of your turns has three phases in order. The rhythm follows the board game, with one change: your hand is smaller. You will have it memorized after your first fight.
- ◆Phase 1, Movement. Move up to your Speed in squares. Forward, back, left, or right only. Crossing an obstacle or a loot crate costs one extra.
- ◆Phase 2, Action. Take one action plus as many free actions as you like. Play a card, loot a crate, equip an item, hand something to an ally.
- ◆Phase 3, Draw. Draw back up to your hand of four. In the RPG your hand caps at four cards, not the twelve of the board game.
The board game ends after twelve rounds. The RPG does not. A campaign runs as long as the story needs. Gold and bounties still matter as rewards, but you are never racing a round counter. The Dealer sets the pace.
What You Need to Play
- ◆A character built with this guide: stats, a faction, a class, a deck with a four-card hand, and a stack of chips.
- ◆The tiles, cards, and chips from your High Noon set.
- ◆A Dealer to run the world and everyone else in it.
- ◆Somewhere to sit and something to argue over. The rest is gunsmoke.