Asilo vs Vampire: The Masquerade
Compare Asilo and Vampire: The Masquerade side by side. See differences in complexity, dice, genre, cost, and more.
| Asilo | Vampire: The Masquerade | |
|---|---|---|
| Genre | Horror | Horror, Modern |
| Tags | Atmospheric, Character-Driven, Deadly, Fear & Stress Mechanics, Improvisation, One-Shot Friendly, Random Tables, Roleplay-Heavy, Rules-Light, Strong GM Support | Social Intrigue, Faction Play, Urban Fantasy, Corruption, Drama, Investigation, Lore-Heavy |
| Core Mechanic | When an action warrants it, a Patient rolls a d6 and succeeds by equaling or exceeding the difficulty the Caretaker sets. Traumatic events add a d6 result to the Sanity Clock, and completed stress sectors reveal new Behaviors. | Roll a pool of d10s (attribute + skill), count successes (6+). Hunger dice replace regular dice in the pool: their 10s trigger Messy Criticals and their 1s trigger Bestial Failures, making the Beast an ever-present threat. |
| Dice | d6 | d10 dice pool |
| Complexity | Low | Medium |
| Accessibility | Medium | High |
| Runnability | Medium | Very High |
| License | Proprietary | Proprietary |
| Third-Party Publishing | No verified route found | Not yet researched |
| Summary only, not legal advice. Check current terms before publishing. | ||
| Cost | $ | $$ |
| Publisher | Newborn Games | Renegade Game Studios |
| Year | 2025 | 2018 |
| Best For | Groups prepared to establish firm safety boundaries before a one-shot clinical-horror descent driven by character-specific stress. It suits Caretakers who want prewritten scenarios and prompts for tailoring Asilo to a table's chosen limits. | Drama-heavy campaigns exploring themes of addiction, power, and losing your humanity. |
| Highlights | Stress Rolls fill each Sanity Clock until new Behaviors alter how that Patient is played. Goals and discovered Secrets can remove or add Stress Dots, making personal history affect whether a Patient deteriorates. Destroying a signed Liability Waiver sacrifices one Patient to clear another's Behavior, turning a physical table ritual into a final rescue. | Hunger system mechanically integrates the vampire's predatory nature into every dice roll. Clan membership and sect politics structure who a character allies with and opposes, giving the social game mechanical weight. Humanity and Stains system tracks moral erosion with narrative consequences. |
| Considerations | The game centers clinical abuse, trauma, and other extreme material, requiring explicit group boundaries and active comfort tools. Each Patient's stress mitigations become Manias after three uses, making the downward pressure difficult to reverse. Asilo is designed for individual sessions, so it does not provide campaign advancement for recurring Patients. | Hunger dice inject swingy results at the worst moments, since a Bestial Failure can surface on a critical roll. Play leans heavily on social and political maneuvering, so groups expecting frequent combat will find that side of the system thin. Choosing a clan and predator type at creation assumes setting knowledge the player may not have yet. |