Smallville Roleplaying Game vs Vampire: The Masquerade
Compare Smallville Roleplaying Game and Vampire: The Masquerade side by side. See differences in complexity, dice, genre, cost, and more.
| Smallville Roleplaying Game | Vampire: The Masquerade | |
|---|---|---|
| Genre | Superhero, Modern | Horror, Modern |
| Tags | Licensed IP, Superpowers, Character-Driven, Drama, Narrative, Collaborative, Worldbuilding, Roleplay-Heavy, Fear & Stress Mechanics, Strong GM Support | Social Intrigue, Faction Play, Urban Fantasy, Corruption, Drama, Investigation, Lore-Heavy |
| Core Mechanic | Roll a d4–d12 pool built from one Value and one Relationship, with an Asset die if applicable. Add the two highest dice. Dice showing 1 are Complications and never count. Plot Points can add dice to the pool before the roll or include more rolled dice in the total afterward. Tests normally pit your roll against the GM's Trouble pool. Ties go to the GM. Contests exchange action and reaction rolls until someone Gives In or fails to beat the previous total and takes Stress. Giving In concedes the opponent's demand but avoids Stress. | 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–d12 dice pool | d10 dice pool |
| Complexity | Medium | Medium |
| Accessibility | Very Low | High |
| Runnability | Medium | 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 | Unavailable | $$ |
| Publisher | Margaret Weis Productions, Ltd. | Renegade Game Studios |
| Year | 2010 | 2018 |
| Languages | English | English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Polish, Russian, Portuguese |
| Best For | Groups who want superhero stories driven by relationship drama, where the player characters' convictions and loyalties clash with each other as often as they face villains. | Drama-heavy campaigns exploring themes of addiction, power, and losing your humanity. |
| Highlights | Challenging a Drive triples its die for one roll but steps it back for the episode, turning a crisis of conviction into Growth. Group character creation builds a shared map of people and places that supplies material for later episodes. When an opponent fails to beat your action result, they take Stress rather than concede your demand, making Giving In a separate choice. | 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 | Creating an original cast through Pathways takes a few hours of group work before the first episode. Episode preparation centers on conflicts between player characters rather than a unified party's shared objective. Winning a Contest cannot kill a character by itself, because killing in a Contest requires that character's player to Give In and accept death. | 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. |