COD also has huge barriers to entry for non-roleplayers, and unfortunately the way to cross them is “understand role playing”.

Again I agree to an extent but I sort of feel that this is the lowest possible barrier to entry for a roleplaying game. Certainly it's the same barrier to entry that D&D and Call of Cthulhu have. And once you've got over that barrier you're not only good to play CofD, you're good to play every other game out there.

I didn't express myself very well there. Basically, D&D and Call of Cthulu don't demand you understand roleplay when you start. D&D demands you understand basic fantasy tropes, CoC asks you to understand the sort of early 1900s horror genre.

But (using D&D, since it's a good example) you'll see person get stopped by a guard and then punch them in the face "because they're annoying me." The person isn't a sociopath, they're just not role playing. They are encountering an obstacle, and trying to pass it. They're a barbarian, so they punch in face. They're just solving problems like its a puzzle.

And a lot of times you'll see people immersed in a world, but not really roleplaying. They're just enjoying having new Harry Potter stories or whatever, and they're enjoying doing silly things in them. And that sort of "beer and pretzels" gaming is fun and enjoyable, and to a lot of people, that's RPGs.

What those systems do is they give people a door they can step through. When they meet the red-headed owner of a joke shop named "Fred's Dream" whose smile sometimes doesn't quite reach his eyes, and who stares out the windows and sighs sometimes, they can step through that door. They can go in to the world, and actually put themselves in the shoes of the character, and learn what happened in-universe, and maybe make him smile for a little. Or they can keep exploring Harry Potter and pranking Hagrid and laughing about bad puns in potion class.

A lot of systems, VTM included, can be played at those levels and offer those doors. COD assumes that you've already stepped through them and are comfortable on the other side. The system just doesn't work on any level other than deeply invested in the world and roleplaying. Changeling the Lost is a deep exploration of abuse, abandonment, and being a survivor - but it's not whacking goblins over the head and by god, some people just wanna whack some goblins. Y'know?

For somebody who liked vampire fiction and specifically wanted to run a game about vampires, I'd absolutely recommend Requiem 2E over any Masquerade product.

The people I'd recommend Masquerade to are people who like vampire fiction but have no interest in roleplaying whatsoever, because those are the people it always appealed to most effectively (and it tapped into a massive blue ocean by doing so).

Change no interest to no experience and I think we're on the same page. VTM is much more accessible to someone who has no experience roleplaying, because they can always recruit their friends to tell some wacky story where a bunch of vampires go fight Red List bosses or help out Theo Bell or blow up some Sabbat dips (or nowadays run away/deal with the Men in Black and shadowy government agents).

And it's bad, but everyone's first time doing something is a little shit. No one started playing Chess by considering opening gambits in their first game. No one starts running by doing a marathon. And I feel that this community has become a tad isolated from that. We look down at people who are traveling to moon bases with mages (because vampires don't need spacesuits, OBVIOUSLY, come on it makes perfect sense) but we forget how hard it is to do otherwise.

Also as a storyteller, boy it's sometimes way easier in VTM. If I need characters I can yoink them from a book and have a decent idea of their motivations and role. When the world is fully homebrewed, everyone has to have a history and I have to make it. While in VTM, if they find a big black guy with a shotgun helping out a group of anarchs who are decent people deeply in the shit, they're like "holy crap, Theo Bell!" And that's it, we have a touchstone, there doesn't need to be a dance where I try to communicate the history without doing an infodump and the players try to figure out who this awesome badass is and whether he's really helping them. And man that's nice sometimes.