Don't Rest Your Head vs Mage: The Ascension

Compare Don't Rest Your Head and Mage: The Ascension side by side. See differences in complexity, dice, genre, cost, and more.

	Don't Rest Your Head	Mage: The Ascension
Genre	Horror, Modern	Fantasy, Modern, Horror
Tags	Urban Fantasy, Fear & Stress Mechanics, Superpowers, Corruption, Resource Management, Weird, Narrative, Character-Driven, Rules-Light, Atmospheric	Freeform Magic, Character Building, Crunchy, High-Power, Roll to Cast, Skill-Based, Lore-Heavy, Fear & Stress Mechanics
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.	Build a d10 pool from an Attribute plus an Ability and count each die that meets or exceeds the difficulty, usually 6. Each rolled 1 cancels a success, and a roll with no successes and at least one 1 botches. Magick uses Arete instead: the highest Sphere plus coincidence or vulgarity and witnesses establishes the base difficulty, with situational modifiers applied afterward. Successes determine the Effect, and vulgar casting risks Paradox.
Dice	d6 dice pool	d10 dice pool
Complexity	Low	Very High
Accessibility	High	High
Runnability	Very High	Very High
License	All Rights Reserved	All Rights Reserved
Third-Party Publishing	No verified route found	Commercial publishing allowed — Storytellers Vault
Summary only, not legal advice. Check current terms before publishing.
Cost	$	$$
Publisher	Evil Hat Productions	Onyx Path Publishing
Year	2006	2015
Languages	English, French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish	English, French, German, Italian, Russian, 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 long-form modern occult campaigns about reality-shaping power, ideological conflict, and the consequences of imposing belief on the world.
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.	Nine Spheres combine to build open-ended Effects, allowing the same capability to emerge through different paradigms, practices, and instruments. Coincidental and vulgar classifications make subtlety a tactical choice because conspicuous magick raises difficulty and accumulates Paradox. Focus ties belief to procedure, so a mage's worldview determines the tools and rituals used to alter reality.
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.	Improvised Effects place frequent adjudication on the Storyteller, who must apply Sphere permissions, focus, required successes, and consequences consistently. Vulgar magick generates Paradox even on success, so overt power can punish a mage through injury or metaphysical breakdown. Faction choices can make a cabal internally hostile, so character concepts need shared motives before play.