Most WoD games I've played, there was a lot of fighting. Especially Werewolf, which is kind of built for that. It is true though, that anybody-- no matter how powerful-- can get killed by much weaker characters.
Once, this guy who wasn't part of our regular gaming group wanted to run Werewolf, and we said okay. So me and a couple of the regular guys played with him and his friends, and he let us make Rank 2 werewolves with some extra freebie points. As we sort of expected, the game was just a big combat fest, and at the end he threw some 5th Generation elder super-vampire at us, some over-powered character, and all the players were petrified because the guy running the game just flat out told us how powerful the guy was. Obviously, this was not a good game.
By then I was tired, and I know this was a dumb, lowbrow, power gamer thing to do, but I pointed out what the elder vampire's maximum number of actions could be, what his max dice pools could be, and that we were all high-Rage werewolves and there was simply no way he could last one round against us if everybody blew most of their Rage points and attacked in Crinos (Wolf-man) form, because he would just plain run out of dice to dodge or parry all of our attacks. The last half of the round would basically be werewolves hitting automatically and slowly killing him with their minimum damage (assuming Vlad the Impaled did manage to soak it all). And I won't go into all the math, but it was, essentially, true. After my statement, this guy, the GM (Storyteller in WoD), made a face, and then, on the vampire's initiative he "used a Thaumaturgy spell" and actually teleported away.
So yeah, it's on me for agreeing to play in that awful game, but the anecdote is a long way of saying that, yes, White Wolf has no equivalent relationship to the mechanical power difference between a 1st and a 20th level character. Any time you get in a fight, death is possible.