Hi, I'm planning to run a few nighthaze games and I was wondering if there are pre-made stat blocks anywhere, and if not do you have tips on how to build npcs (like guards or ponies they're otherwise going to potentially have to make contesting rolls or saves)? Or should I basically build player characters? Also, any tips on balancing for the early game? My only experience with ttrpgs is dnd 5e, so I don't know where to begin balancing for a system that is so different at its core
Up top, you might want to check out the Operator's Manual - the Nighthaze DMG. It's incomplete, a bit rambling, and not as useful as it could be, but you might get something from it at least!
There's a few questions here so let's take them one by one:
Unfortunately I don't really have any usable stat blocks (it's one of the things people have been begging me for), but you really don't need to make player characters. For Infiltration the main thing that matters is how much attention NPCs are paying (whether for players sneaking around or lying to them) and for that you can treat the NPCs as world features. You can vibe out the difficulty of checks the same way you would a stuck door or a lock being picked or whatever. I don't do opposed rolls vs NPCs usually because it takes longer but that's taste. If you want your guards to have a puzzle element to them you can maybe trawl the item list for something useful to give them, that the players might be able to see them using, and maybe steal it as a reward for catching one. Save complex motivations and ulterior motives for important NPCs, like ones you might give a name to.
To convert Nighthaze difficulty to D&D difficulty (approximately), multiply by 5 - so a Target of 1 would be roughly equal to DC5, Target 4 ~= DC20, etc. I would consider 6 to be the highest I'd ever set a Target at for tasks that even world experts are more likely to fail than succeed.
For combat stats, here's your checklist:
Defensive stats. Dodge, Concentration, Resistance, Security (if relevant). These all default to 2 but you can mess with them to make certain attack types more or less useful. You can also give them one or two armour types (Kinetic and Grapple are the most common).
HP. By default Nighthaze NPCs go down to 3 hits of the same type or 5 of any type (it's a mess, I'm working on it). You can add to this with Shields (plate carriers or energy shields) that eat more damage, or adjust the amount directly for things like monsters, robots, drones, etc. If you have one boss (like a large monster or a souped up Jump Cannon type) their health+shields should equal the combined total of the player party or they're going to get smoked by round 2. Also consider giving them extra turns in the turn order to balance the action economy. This part is pretty similar to D&D.
Pick an Initiative value. Arbitrary. Doesn't matter a ton.
Attacks. I tend to scour the equipment list to give them one or two items as the basis for their attack, which doubles as loot when defeated. Basic mooks are going to have simple weapons, elite opponents are going to have expensive ones and a utility tool like a short range teleport, or LODAR vision, or a leash spell. (Spells notably are not loot.) For rolls I generally put attacks on a 6-10 scale, where weak encounters roll 6 dice and strong ones roll a 10 (remember players are often starting rolling 7 or 8 for their primary attack). If they have more than one attack, the second one will use one less dice. As you get more comfortable with how Nighthaze works you can graduate from just picking stuff arbitrarily from the list to forming squads with tactics that are designed to work together, like herders (using push effects and crowd control to drag players into an AoE wombo zone) or snatch squads (grappling one player and then teleporting away with them to separate them). This is where the juice of Nighthaze is, you can be a lot more dangerous with clever use of tools than with raw numbers alone. The players will experience this too, Nighthaze has a lot more horizontal progression than vertical progression.
Objective. What do these enemies want? Only autonomous robots and drones are truly prepared to fight to the death. Determine the point at which your NPCs will decide a fight is unwinnable, and what they do about it - more disciplined enemies might conduct an organised retreat, more disorganised ones will break and run as soon as their confidence is gone. Cornered animals will bolt as soon as there's an opening, hungry monsters will go find less bitey prey pretty quickly. How likely are they to surrender? What would their terms for a truce be?
Four grunts with assault rifles or another automatic weapon are deceptively dangerous. If they're allowed to sit behind cover at a distance and plink 8 attacks per round into the party they will mince them.
About the transition from D&D 5e:
Magic is both weaker and more ubiquitous. "Magic is Mundane" is the axiom here. Nothing even close to Wish exists, but magic is so common as to be used as a normal component in manufactured products, not unlike electricity. A skilled mage is like a martial arts master - impressive and strong, certainly, but industry has invented more efficient ways to do those jobs at scale. No linear-warriors-quadratic-wizards.
Stealth is a more fully featured part of the game where everyone is expected to contribute, because you'll be spending most of your time in it.
Combat, while still fully featured, is shorter and sharper. While actually dying is harder, health is less of an expendable resource. Attrition combat is gruelling. If your players figure out ways to skip fights by being clever or sneaky, let them.
Nighthaze does not have universal attacks of opportunity. You need specific items or abilities for that.
Nighthaze expects you to actually use the rules it gives you in a way that 5E does not. For example, Carry Capacity - in 5E it's a tedious chore because your inventory is like an enormous unsorted sock drawer, and it's part of the set of mechanics that are mainly there for legacy reasons, because people freak out if they're not there. In Nighthaze your Carry Limit is usually in single digits and weaker characters might struggle to hold more than two items before hitting penalties (but it's assumed you have access to storage somewhere so you don't have to carry your life on your back). It's a meaningful part of your power budget! This aspect is common to basically every game that isn't D&D: your first game of Nighthaze should not need to be "fixed" with homebrew.
Nighthaze does not have an early-levels slump where characters are missing their defining features. The convention of starting 5E characters at 3rd level is a thing unique to 5E. If anything the starting point for Nighthaze as-is is too high!
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