Don't Rest Your Head vs Kids on Bikes

Compare Don't Rest Your Head and Kids on Bikes side by side. See differences in complexity, dice, genre, and more.

	Don't Rest Your Head	Kids on Bikes
Genre	Horror, Modern	Horror, Modern
Tags	Urban Fantasy, Fear & Stress Mechanics, Superpowers, Corruption, Resource Management, Weird, Narrative, Character-Driven, Rules-Light, Atmospheric	Mystery, Worldbuilding, Collaborative, Narrative, Character-Driven, Fear & Stress Mechanics, Superpowers, Rules-Light, One-Shot Friendly, Beginner-Friendly
Core Mechanic	Players roll their current discipline and exhaustion dice, any permanent madness dice, and up to six optional temporary madness dice against the GM's pain dice. They may voluntarily add one exhaustion die before rolling. Each d6 showing 1–3 is a success, and the protagonist wins ties in total successes. Separately, the pool with the highest die dominates regardless of success; tied pools compare their remaining dice from highest to lowest, with exact ties favoring discipline, then madness, exhaustion, and pain. Discipline dominance can reduce exhaustion or clear a response, exhaustion dominance raises exhaustion, madness dominance triggers a fight or flight response, and pain dominance adds a despair coin to the GM's coffer.	Assign a different die from d4 to d20 to each stat. Roll the relevant die against a GM-set difficulty. A maximum result lets you reroll and add the new result only while the unmodified total remains below the difficulty. Resolve these explosions before adding bonuses or spending Adversity Tokens to meet or beat the difficulty. Failed checks earn Adversity Tokens that can boost later rolls or activate strengths. Planned actions can use half the die’s maximum instead of rolling.
Dice	d6 dice pool	d4–d20
Complexity	Low	Low
Availability	Free quickstart	Free quickstart
Runnability	5 of 5 book tools	4 of 5 book tools
License	All Rights Reserved	All Rights Reserved
Third-Party Publishing	No verified route found	No verified route found
Summary only, not legal advice. Check current terms before publishing.
Publisher	Evil Hat Productions	Hunters Entertainment / Renegade Game Studios
Year	2006	2018
Languages	English, French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish	English, Italian, Spanish
Best For	Groups who want short, personal urban-horror campaigns driven by each protagonist's insomnia, secrets, and goals, with powers that risk exhaustion and psychological breakdown.	Groups who want to build a small-town mystery together and share control of its supernatural companion alongside their own everyday characters.
Highlights	Dominance is decided separately from success, so a protagonist can win a conflict while exhaustion, madness, or pain still exacts a cost. Despair spent to alter dominance becomes shared hope after the conflict, funding recovery or extra successes. The five-question questionnaire structures personal scenes and gives players authority over their opening scene and the resolution of their path.	Shared town-building and relationship questions give the GM player-created hooks for the mystery. Each player controls aspects of a shared supernatural character, distributing its choices across the table. Failed rolls earn tokens that can turn later setbacks into successes.
Considerations	Helping offers limited benefit: assistants contribute only discipline successes, cannot use talents, and remain vulnerable to dominance effects. Injury and equipment have no separate statistics and are handled through conflict outcomes. There is no XP-point or skill-growth system; advancement uses scars for rerolls or consumable transformations, including temporary or permanent talent changes.	Combat can kill a character outright when the attack roll greatly exceeds the defense roll. Players must help narrate outcomes beyond their own characters under the default shared-control approach. Character growth is negotiated from events in play rather than governed by levels or an experience-point track.