Call of Cthulhu vs Vampire: The Masquerade
Compare Call of Cthulhu and Vampire: The Masquerade side by side. See differences in complexity, dice, genre, cost, and more.
| Call of Cthulhu | Vampire: The Masquerade | |
|---|---|---|
| Genre | Horror, Modern | Horror, Modern |
| Play Style | Investigation, Deadly, One-Shot Friendly, Atmospheric, Roleplay-Heavy, Mystery, Horror, Corruption, Skill-Based | Social Intrigue, Faction Play, Urban Fantasy, Corruption, Drama, Investigation, Lore-Heavy |
| Core Mechanic | Roll d100 equal to or under your skill percentage. Success tiers at half (Hard) and one-fifth (Extreme) of the skill value. Bonus and penalty dice adjust the tens digit. Failed rolls can be pushed for a second attempt at greater risk. | 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 | d100 | d10 dice pool |
| Complexity | Medium | Medium |
| Accessibility | High | High |
| Runnability | Very High | Very High |
| License | Chaosium Fan Material Policy | Proprietary |
| Cost | $$ | $$ |
| Publisher | Chaosium | Renegade Game Studios |
| Year | 2014 | 2018 |
| Best For | Investigation-driven horror where combat is deadly and sanity is fragile. Great for one-shots. | Drama-heavy campaigns exploring themes of addiction, power, and losing your humanity. |
| Highlights | Tracking Sanity as a depletable score ties mental erosion to the fiction, so confronting cosmic horror mechanically wears characters down. The percentile skills resolve on a d100 roll-under, with Hard and Extreme bands at half and one-fifth of the rating. Bouts of Madness convert failed Sanity checks into temporary phobias, manias, or loss of character control. | 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 chase rules add a detailed positioning subsystem whose complexity outweighs how often it sees use. Character creation allocates points across a long list of skills, a slow first step for new players. In long campaigns the sanity spiral can strip a character of player control as madness accumulates. | 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. |