Don't Rest Your Head vs Shifters

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

	Don't Rest Your Head	Shifters
Genre	Horror, Modern	Horror, Modern
Tags	Urban Fantasy, Fear & Stress Mechanics, Superpowers, Corruption, Resource Management, Weird, Narrative, Character-Driven, Rules-Light, Atmospheric	Atmospheric, Character-Driven, Corruption, Deadly, Fear & Stress Mechanics, Gritty, Superpowers, Survival, Urban Fantasy, Weird
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.	Roll an attribute die and usually a skill die, each sized from d4 to d20 by the character's rating. Read each die separately: 5–9 gives one success, 10–14 two, 15–19 three, and 20 four. A 1 adds a complication even when the other die succeeds. Meet the Referee's required success count or beat an opponent's successes, with extra successes adding Harm or other effects. Each player gets one Nudge per session to shift a single die by one point after the roll.
Dice	d6 dice pool	d4–d20
Complexity	Low	Medium
Availability	Free quickstart	Paid
Runnability	5 of 5 book tools	2 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	Late Gaming Company
Year	2006	2026
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 modern occult horror where hunting haunted objects risks eroding their characters' identities.
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.	Harm steps attribute dice down directly, so damage weakens the dice used for later actions. The otherworld called the Gloom drains an attribute step at each scene's start and end unless resisted through sacrifice, weakening the dice needed to escape. Haunted objects called Residues have destruction conditions tied to their emotional origins, turning hunts toward memorials or exposing abuse rather than combat alone.
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.	The core provides no advancement procedure, leaving the group to decide how skills or abilities improve over a campaign. The colossal beings called Infadha take no Harm from attacks, so ordinary combat cannot defeat them. Several sample Residues are built on suicide, child abuse, and domestic abuse, with safety guidance limited to brief advice during character creation.