Don't Rest Your Head vs Rifts

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

	Don't Rest Your Head	Rifts
Genre	Horror, Modern	Post-Apocalyptic, Scifi, Fantasy, Horror, Superhero
Tags	Urban Fantasy, Fear & Stress Mechanics, Superpowers, Corruption, Resource Management, Weird, Narrative, Character-Driven, Rules-Light, Atmospheric	Character Building, Combat-Heavy, Crunchy, Fear & Stress Mechanics, Gonzo, High-Power, Mana Points, Mecha, Superpowers, Tactical
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.	Combat and saving throws use a d20 plus bonuses, with high results overcoming a target number or opposing roll. Skills use d100 and succeed when the result is at or below the character's percentage.
Dice	d6 dice pool	d20, d100
Complexity	Low	Very High
Accessibility	High	Medium
Runnability	Very High	Very High
License	All Rights Reserved	All Rights Reserved
Third-Party Publishing	No verified route found	Noncommercial only — Palladium Books Internet Policy limited license
Summary only, not legal advice. Check current terms before publishing.
Cost	$	$$
Publisher	Evil Hat Productions	Palladium Books Inc.
Year	2006	2005
Languages	English, French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish	English
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 science-fantasy campaigns that move from a ruined Earth to other dimensions. The game suits tables whose GM will decide which parts of the broad setting a campaign uses.
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.	Occupational and racial class packages assign distinct abilities and advancement tracks, giving each archetype a different role in the party. Mega-Damage places many supernatural creatures and war machines on a separate durability scale beyond the reach of ordinary Structural Damage Capacity attacks. Rifts and ley lines make dimensional travel a standing feature of the setting, letting campaigns move between devastated Earth and other worlds.
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.	Character creation combines rolled attributes with extensive skill selection, making first-time preparation lengthy. Combat asks each player to track an action economy, active defenses, and which damage scale applies. Magic and psionics use separate point pools and power procedures, adding class-specific rules to the shared system.