Fear and Panic vs Vampire: The Masquerade
Compare Fear and Panic and Vampire: The Masquerade side by side. See differences in complexity, dice, genre, cost, and more.
| Fear and Panic | Vampire: The Masquerade | |
|---|---|---|
| Genre | Horror | Horror, Modern |
| Tags | CC-Licensed Rules, Classless, Deadly, Fast-Paced, Fear & Stress Mechanics, Low-Prep, One-Shot Friendly, Rules-Light, Skill-Based, Theater of the Mind | Social Intrigue, Faction Play, Urban Fantasy, Corruption, Drama, Investigation, Lore-Heavy |
| Core Mechanic | Roll d100 equal to or below the relevant skill. In opposed tests, a success beats a failure, the higher success wins, and the higher roll wins if both sides fail; doubles are critical. | 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 | Low | Medium |
| Accessibility | Medium | High |
| Runnability | Low | Very High |
| License | CC BY 4.0 | Proprietary |
| Third-Party Publishing | Commercial publishing allowed — Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International | Not yet researched |
| Summary only, not legal advice. Check current terms before publishing. | ||
| Cost | $ | $$ |
| Publisher | Lyme | Renegade Game Studios |
| Year | 2025 | 2018 |
| Best For | One-shots and short horror campaigns about ordinary people, especially groups converting existing d100 scenarios and wanting lethal conflict without tactical maps. | Drama-heavy campaigns exploring themes of addiction, power, and losing your humanity. |
| Highlights | Player-triggered Fear turns frightening moments into a resource for desperate actions such as rerolls or rapid investigation. One opposed Violence roll compares Fight or Flee against Menace and Escape, producing injuries, displacement, capture, or death without hit points. Scars persist between adventures and exchange one capability for another, making survival change characters mechanically. | 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 | Fear gain relies on players deciding when their characters are scared, so the economy depends on shared genre judgment. Violence can end in death after one opposed roll, with simultaneous resolution, no tactical maps, and no hit points. Traits and campaign-specific skills are open-ended, leaving their scope and balance to GM adjudication. | 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. |