RPGPundit Reviews: Don't Rest Your Head
or, The Most Complicated Game Of "Risk" You'll Ever Play

Don't Rest Your Head: A Game Of Insomnia In the Mad City, is a game by Fred Hicks, and Evil Hat Productions.  The version I'm reviewing is the "lightweight" version, which is apparently not different in content from the print version, though its divided into two columns per page, halving its size for, I presume, convenience.

Don't Rest Your Head is, according to its author, an "Expert Roleplaying Game", a statement that isn't quite as pretentious as it might seem at first, when the author clears up that he just means to say that the game presumes that anyone playing it has played other RPGs in the past.  The game is a curious intent at trying to find a middle ground between a mainstream RPG and a storygame.  This leaves a bad taste in my mouth as a mainstream gamer, and I can only speculate but I can suspect that it might also fail to satisfy hardcore storygamers.  It ends up being too conventional for the Forge crowd and far too gimmicky and pretentious for the mainstream crowd.

But I'll leave any Forge-centric review, and its praise or blame, to someone else who gives a fuck.  I'm going to review it from the point of view of conventional mainstream play.   The short verdict?  The concept is interesting, the setting is pretentious (big surprise) and the mechanics are the most convoluted game of Risk you will ever play.

The basic premise of the game is that all the PCs are insomniacs, who got to a point in their insomnia where they somehow slipped into the Mad City, the world that exists outside of sleep.  There they have wonderous powers, but they also have to confront the Nightmares that haunt this place, and most of all, they have to avoid falling asleep, or else.

The question isn't really "or else what?" (the answer to that being "or else the nightmares can get you and tear you to pieces"), the question is "in order to do what?".  The place, to me, where the game falls flat is that it creates a good setup of a setting, makes the "rules" of the setting clear, but lacks providing any kind of motivation whatsoever that can either drive the PCs individually or as a group.

I mean, ok, you have to fight the Nightmares. Why? Why do the Nightmares give a fuck about you? It doesn't really say. Why would you want to give a fuck about them? Again, it doesn't say.
Is the goal to get out of Mad City? Nope. You can come and go from there, though you ultimately can't go back to having a normal life again (so that's not really the goal either).
In short, the game provides the pieces of the setting, but absolutely nothing to create a motivation for gaming in it. There isn't even a mechanic by which one can gain power or influence beyond what he has.
And of course, this being a micro-game that isn't meant to be for long-term play, there's no mechanic as such for character advancement (well, sort of... see below).

Character creation begins with a questionnaire asking you to detail your character's origin, his personality, and his drives. Then you pick if your character is more a "flight" or "fight" type of guy, and you pick one regular skill that you are suddenly better at doing because of your magical insomnia, and finally one special, supernatural power, that you're suddenly able to do because of your crazy magical insomnia. At that point you're done. The game has neither attributes nor skills. Instead it has "discipline", which everyone gets at the same level to begin with (though you can end up losing points of discipline as part of the complex system mechanic; though as far as I saw there's no in-game way to raise your discipline).

The system itself is a kind of dicepool, but easily one of the most convoluted gimmicky dicepools you will ever see. Just to give you an idea, it actually requires the following: three white D6s ("signifying discipline"), six black D6s ("signifying exhaustion"), six-to-eight red D6s ("signifying madness"), ten coins per player ("signifying coins"--I fucking kid you not, that's what it actually says in the book!), ten to fifteen D6s of any colour ("signifying pain", which is what I'm already in by this point), one light coloured bowl (for keeping track of despair), and one dark coloured bowl (for keeping track of hope).

I mean shit, that's a lot of material for a micro-game you won't even get to run a campaign for, and gimmicky to boot.  Its the only fucking alleged-RPG I've ever seen where you're required to go to fucking Pottery Barn before you're able to play it.

How the fuck does all this stuff work?  When the PC wants to do something, he rolls his discipline dice (the white ones), and any exhaustion dice he has at the moment in his exhaustion pool.  If he wants, he can raise his exhaustion level to throw more dice (the black ones). If he's using his supernatural power or putting himself "through psychological strain", he can also roll up to six madness dice (the red ones).
He rolls ALL of these dice together at once. Meanwhile the GM rolls a number of Pain dice varying by the GM's judgement of what the opposition to his action is.
Then you count successes. Any die that rolled under 3 is a success. You count up successes and compare them to the GM's to see whether your intended action succeeds or fails (in case of a tie, the PC.. sorry, the Protagonist, wins; Yes, this is the game where you're all protagonists, except the GM "his only die is pain").
But wait, there's more! When you've checked for the success, you then also compare the highest die you rolled of each colour to each other and to the highest one the GM rolled. Whichever colour was highest is what "dominates" the action. The "dominant" nature of the roll determines how the success or failure comes to pass, whether its due to your discipline, exhaustion, madness, or pain.
If the highest roll in one or more area is a tie, then you compare the second highest die in each area (hence my Risk analogy). If two or more areas are still tied, then you go down to the next die.  If all the dice are tied, then we move on to rock-paper-scissors; discipline beats madness, madness beats exhaustion, exhaustion beats pain.

Dominance has different effects on each action; if pain dominates, for example, you throw a coin into the Despair bowl.  The GM can later use this as currency, spending said coin to take away rolls of 6 from the player's dice pool.  When he does so, however, the coin gets tossed into the Hope bowl, which the player can later use to reduce his exhaustion or madness.

Gimmicky enough for you?

As for actual skills, mechanics, difficulty modifiers, damage track, etc... all of these are playing hookey today, no doubt having more fun at the arcade than I'm having reviewing this book.
And its not that characters can't get injured or killed in this game, but I guess that's up for the player and GM to negotiate about, including as to whether it will have any long-term effects on the PC.  The only stat that is tracked for "damage" are madness, which build up very fast, and exhaustion, which do likewise. Too much madness and you go looney and become a Nightmare, too much exhaustion and you fall asleep.

After the mechanics, we get to the GM section, where the very first issue is the Narrative Control issue. This is why I say that Hicks is trying to create a compromise game. Rather than clearly stating that the players have the control, or that the GM does, he suggests that this game can go both ways, the great bisexual of the RPG world. The idea is that the players and GM should decide beforehand whether the players get to decide what happens in the game or the GM does, and just agree.
In practice, it seems to me that the mechanics are already going to be doing a hell of a lot of the controlling, since each bloody action comes with an automatic determination of whether the player's ability, or tiredness, or crazyness, or the opponents end up dominating the scene.  The only thing that either player or GM end up deciding is the window dressing. Who gets to decide is still important, but the odds are already effectively stacked against the GM in every way. Even if the players don't decide to take control out of the GMs hand, all he's left with is to be the interpreter of what the mechanics direct; because the mechanics aren't made to determine plain old success or failure of action like they are in other RPGs, they're made to determine the actual interpretation of those successes or failures.

The GM advice also suggests that any game that isn't directly about the player's interests as based in their initial question-and-answer character creation would be an inferior, or at best, a pointless game. So much for the GM being able to make his campaign be about something, other than trying to juggle the player's various demands for "protagonism".
Ah, you say, but doesn't the GM get to help frame the player's initial motivations? Actually, no. The book specifies that the "first scene" for each player is framed and directed entirely by the player. In other words, the GM must sit there and watch the player run his own little onanistic scene with himself, the scene in question being the one that determines everything about the player's motivations, which the game explicitly says is the only thing worth running the game about.

Oh well, what about the setting itself? Its an interesting enough place I suppose. Directly inspired by the Midnight Nation, Doom Patrol, and Neverwhere settings (and given due credit by the author in the bibliography); the Mad City is a wierd surreal place full of ominous strangeness. Its "the place where missing socks and broken toys come to live a second life. Where the thirteenth hour on the clock went, and where forgotten constellations fled to when their gods died". In other words, pretentiousland.

People can come or go from the Mad City to normal cities (called "The City Slumbering") through portals or gateways, but only insomniacs can do so and be aware of where they are.The place is a big anachronistic jumble of architecture and wierdness that superimposes itself on the normal city.  It has some particular peculiar qualities, like local people (who were either born or slipped through to the city without being insomniacs) that end up filling an archetypal job that they just keep doing over and over again, all day long.
The city is also run/controlled by Nightmares, some of which are very powerful demonic creatures, including a policeman who's face is a clock, an evil sadistic politician who's head is a pincushion, an evil schoolmarm (because every horror setting needs an evil demonic schoolmarm), and the "paperboys": little newsboys made out of newspaper who can write a headline predicting terrible fates that will end up coming to pass.
Like I said, the setting is ok if a bit pretentious, but its just a bunch of stuff, without any real concept to tie it all together.

Remember I was talking about character advancement? The author almost reluctantly suggests that if you want to commit the Indie Cardinal Sin of running a longer-term campaign, you can simulate a kind of experience system by using "scars"; where your character's past failures can be recalled as a way to allow you a reroll on your dice if the past failure is relevant to the present situation. He can also permanently "transform" the scar as a way to change his superpower to a different superpower, his normal power to a different normal power, or to shave off a bunch of his exhaustion or craziness. How depressing.

The author, when he presented me this game, was under no illusions that I would like it, and he was right. I don't care for the game. I've seen worse, by a long shot, and I'm guessing some people, the gimmicky-system fetishists out there, might actually dig the wierd-Risk mechanic of the game. Others who are fans of settings like Neverwhere might also dig the setting.  But I think that any attempt by the author to try to bridge the gulf that divides story games from mainstream RPGs was ill-planned, and ultimately unsatisfying, as it only served to highlite just how different these two types of games are from each other.

RPGPundit

"Its the only fucking alleged-RPG I've ever seen where you're required to go to fucking Pottery Barn before you're able to play it."

You're a mean one, Mr. Grinch, but that line cracked me up.

I have a review up at RPG.net if anyone's interested in a little more detail on how the mechanics work.  My group had a lot of fun with it in play.

Review

Thanks for doing the review, sir.  As I suspected, it wasn't your cup of tea, but I'm pleased you were willing to take the time to give it a read-through.

If anyone wants to check out Ken Hite's quick overview of the beast, or other opinions, you can find a number of links on its page at Evil Hat:

http://www.evilhat.com/dryh.php

Thanks again!

-- Fred Hicks

Well Fred, the question now is whether you're going to add me to the "what people are saying" section?

Personally, I'd recommend the "pottery barn" quote.

RPGPundit

"Pleeeease? It took me three whole days to think of that one!"

Quote from: RPGPunditWell Fred, the question now is whether you're going to add me to the "what people are saying" section?

Personally, I'd recommend the "pottery barn" quote.

Time will tell.  I'm celebrating my wife's birthday this weekend, so it'll be next week at the earliest.

Quote from: beejazz"Pleeeease? It took me three whole days to think of that one!"

Actually that one, like most of my writing, was spontaneous.  The "most convoluted game of risk you'll ever play" was the one I'd thought up beforehand.

RPGPundit

Poohbear! DRYH doesn't excite me, either! I have a dream – that one day on the red plains of Uruguay the sons of former poohbears and the sons of former swine will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood and play a game.

Quote from: droogPoohbear! DRYH doesn't excite me, either! I have a dream – that one day on the red plains of Uruguay the sons of former poohbears and the sons of former swine will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood and play a game.

Red plains? You mean The Purple Land?

PS: Available at the Gutenberg Project!

Golly...I'll check it out.