Feng Shui vs Vampire: The Masquerade
Compare Feng Shui and Vampire: The Masquerade side by side. See differences in complexity, dice, genre, cost, and more.
| Feng Shui | Vampire: The Masquerade | |
|---|---|---|
| Genre | Fantasy, Scifi, Historical, Modern, Post-Apocalyptic | Horror, Modern |
| Tags | Cinematic, Combat-Heavy, Fast-Paced, High-Power, Martial Arts, Playbook-Driven, Pulp Action, Strong GM Support, Tactical, Theater of the Mind | Social Intrigue, Faction Play, Urban Fantasy, Corruption, Drama, Investigation, Lore-Heavy |
| Core Mechanic | Roll a positive d6 and a negative d6, subtract the negative die from the positive, and add the Swerve to an Action Value. Meeting or beating the Difficulty succeeds, while open-ended sixes create extreme results. | 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 | 2d6 | d10 dice pool |
| Complexity | Medium | Medium |
| Accessibility | High | High |
| Runnability | Very High | Very High |
| License | All Rights Reserved | Proprietary |
| Third-Party Publishing | No verified route found | Not yet researched |
| Summary only, not legal advice. Check current terms before publishing. | ||
| Cost | $ | $$ |
| Publisher | Atlas Games | Renegade Game Studios |
| Year | 2015 | 2018 |
| Best For | Groups that want fast Hong Kong action, tactical shot-by-shot fights, melodramatic hooks, and time-traveling campaigns that mix genres | Drama-heavy campaigns exploring themes of addiction, power, and losing your humanity. |
| Highlights | A descending shot countdown makes every action and interrupt change when a character acts again. One-hit mooks support crowd-clearing spectacle, while featured foes and bosses use deeper wound rules for climactic fights. Feng shui sites link faction victories to changes in history across four connected eras. | 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 | Combat requires tracking shots, interrupts, wound thresholds, and different enemy tiers. Starting characters use prebuilt archetypes and follow curated advancement tracks. The rules assume proactive cinematic fights and melodrama instead of grounded realism or cautious procedural play. | 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. |