Shifters vs Vampire: The Masquerade
Compare Shifters and Vampire: The Masquerade side by side. See differences in complexity, dice, genre, cost, and more.
| Shifters | Vampire: The Masquerade | |
|---|---|---|
| Genre | Horror, Modern | Horror, Modern |
| Tags | Atmospheric, Character-Driven, Corruption, Deadly, Fear & Stress Mechanics, Gritty, Superpowers, Survival, Urban Fantasy, Weird | Social Intrigue, Faction Play, Urban Fantasy, Corruption, Drama, Investigation, Lore-Heavy |
| Core Mechanic | Roll an attribute die and usually a skill die, each sized from d4 to d20 by the character's rating. Read each die separately: 5–9 gives one success, 10–14 two, 15–19 three, and 20 four. A 1 adds a complication even when the other die succeeds. Meet the Referee's required success count or beat an opponent's successes, with extra successes adding Harm or other effects. Each player gets one Nudge per session to shift a single die by one point after the roll. | 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 | d4–d20 | d10 dice pool |
| Complexity | Medium | Medium |
| Accessibility | Medium | High |
| Runnability | Low | 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 | Late Gaming Company | Renegade Game Studios |
| Year | 2026 | 2018 |
| Languages | English | English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Polish, Russian, Portuguese |
| Best For | Groups who want modern occult horror where hunting haunted objects risks eroding their characters' identities. | Drama-heavy campaigns exploring themes of addiction, power, and losing your humanity. |
| Highlights | Harm steps attribute dice down directly, so damage weakens the dice used for later actions. The otherworld called the Gloom drains an attribute step at each scene's start and end unless resisted through sacrifice, weakening the dice needed to escape. Haunted objects called Residues have destruction conditions tied to their emotional origins, turning hunts toward memorials or exposing abuse rather than combat alone. | 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 core provides no advancement procedure, leaving the group to decide how skills or abilities improve over a campaign. The colossal beings called Infadha take no Harm from attacks, so ordinary combat cannot defeat them. Several sample Residues are built on suicide, child abuse, and domestic abuse, with safety guidance limited to brief advice during character creation. | 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. |