Public Access vs Vampire: The Masquerade
Compare Public Access and Vampire: The Masquerade side by side. See differences in complexity, dice, genre, cost, and more.
| Public Access | Vampire: The Masquerade | |
|---|---|---|
| Genre | Horror, Modern | Horror, Modern |
| Play Style | Investigation, Mystery, Collaborative, Player-Only Rolls, Fiction-First, Character-Driven, Atmospheric, Corruption | Social Intrigue, Faction Play, Urban Fantasy, Corruption, Drama, Investigation, Lore-Heavy |
| Core Mechanic | When a move is triggered, roll 2d6 plus one of five ability modifiers. A 6 or less is a miss, while many moves split hits into 7–9, 10–11, and 12+ tiers. After a result is narrated, a player can turn a Key to raise it one tier and replace that outcome with a different timeline. | 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 | Very High | High |
| Runnability | Low | Very High |
| License | Proprietary | Proprietary |
| Cost | Free | $$ |
| Publisher | The Gauntlet | Renegade Game Studios |
| Year | 2023 | 2018 |
| Best For | Groups seeking a finite collaborative analog-horror campaign where player-built theories, personal histories, and found-footage prompts shape the truth behind a small-town conspiracy | Drama-heavy campaigns exploring themes of addiction, power, and losing your humanity. |
| Highlights | Clues have no fixed locations or canonical answers, so players assemble them into a theory and roll to establish whether it is true. Turning a Key raises a resolved roll by one tier and replaces the narrated failure with an alternate timeline. Odyssey tape prompts let players author uncanny broadcasts that become a campaign timer and feed connections back into Deep Lake. | 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 | Dawn, Day, Dusk, and Night must occur in order, which constrains free-form scene pacing. The Keeper must synthesize campaign discoveries into a custom final TV Odyssey mystery. The intended campaign engages childhood trauma, body horror, ritual sacrifice, and other dark material. | 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. |