In Vampire: The Masquerade 5th Edition players have another set of dice specific to their current Hunger rating of 1 to 5. For each point of Hunger, the player must replace of their dice with these Hunger dice.
THE YEAR WAS NINETEEN-NINETY-ONE and the world was coming to an end. Millennialism hadn't reached a fever pitch yet, but it was there in the air, like the smell of ozone before the storm. Computer geeks were on about something called Y2K, and it was going to throw us all back into the Dark Ages. The fundamentalists--who were seeing vast Satanic conspiracies and blood-thirsty cults pulling global strings behind every scene--were talking more and more about Rapture and writing books like Left Behind. The Red Scare was over, but fear of the New World Order was replacing it. Ruby Ridge and Waco encouraged armed militia groups to multiply. And AIDS? AIDS was still making sex as scary as hell, and blood-borne disease was in everyone's mind. So we knew the world was ending. Prince knew the world was ending. Even the vampires knew the world was ending.
Hell, maybe all of these things plague you.
Showing no mercy I'd do it again
Let's start at the beginning.
The Antediluvians responded with the Beckoning, a powerful summons that drew the Elders of their bloodlines to them. Higher generation vampires, rulers of Kindred communities, answered the call and left the younger vampires holding the reigns.
Thus the wars in Afghanistan, Syria, and Iraq, the so-called 'War on Terror,' conceals a more terrifying truth; Enoch and its masters have awoken.
As the Sabbat and the Elders wage this vicious conflict, the Camarilla--deprived of its senior leadership--has been unable to hold back the Anarchs, the rebellious young vampires now rising up in revolution. The only thing that keeps these two factions from open war is a a greater threat.
The Masquerade has been broken.
While the public doesn't yet know about the existence of vampires, many western intelligence agencies do. The War on Terror has exposed the Kindred at last. The FBI, Homeland Security, and the CIA; MI5 and MI6; France's DGSI and Germany's BND, are all among those now coordinating with the Vatican in a sort of 'Second Inquisition.' Thousands of vampires around the globe have been exterminated in the hunt.
Aside from reshaping the world the vampires live in, V5 has reshaped the systems governing the vampires as well.
The core mechanics remain the same. To attempt an action, players build dice pools of ten-siders. This is usually a characters core Trait (something like Charisma, Dexterity, or Strength) plus a Skill (perhaps Athletics, Etiquette, or Persuasion). Such attributes are rated on a scale of 1 to 5, so your dice pool is generally one to ten dice.
In V5, however, the object is to score a 6 or higher on each die. Those count as successes. If you roll a natural 10, it counts as two successes. You are rolling against a difficulty assigned by the Storyteller (GM). A routine action requires one success, a challenging action requires four. A nearly impossible action will need seven. If you score the number of successes you need, you succeed. Otherwise you fail. Any additional successes make your success even sweeter.
This is all considerably more streamlined than previous editions of Masquerade, but where V5 really demonstrates innovation is in the new Hunger mechanics.
Vampires drink blood; this is the core of the concept. Traditionally Masquerade tracked this with the concept of a 'Blood Pool.' Like a tank of gas, feeding 'filled you up.' Rising each evening, or calling upon your blood to fuel vampiric powers, burned points from your Blood Pool up. As the Pool got lower you got hungrier, and needed to fill up again. The system worked fine, but it focused more on the Blood as a resource than on the actual Hunger which drives vampiric existence.
V5 tosses the idea of Blood Pools and replaces it with Hunger, which like all attributes is on a scale of 0 to 5. At zero you are sated. At five, the lust for blood is overpowering. Rising each night, or using your vampiric powers, triggers a 'Rouse' check. This is the roll of a single die; succeed, and your Hunger remains at present levels. Fail, and your Hunger increases by one. More powerful vampiric abilities might require multiple Rouse checks. The lower your vampire's Generation (the closer he is to Caine), the greater your chance of being able to re-roll Rouse checks (compensating for the fact that in previous editions these characters had larger Blood Pools).
Now, to show the overpowering force of the Hunger on vampires, every dice pool you build (with the exception of things like Willpower or Humanity checks) must contain Hunger dice. These are dice of a different color. If, for example, you are making a Charisma + Persuasion roll and have a dice pool of six, and your Hunger is currently three, then half of your dice will be Hunger dice. Hunger dice work normally...unless they come up 1s or 10s.
If they come up tens, they still act as double successes, but the Beast--the monstrous vampire nature all characters wrestle with--emerges and colors the result. A vampire trying to pick a lock might lose control and just rip it off its hinges. A vampire trying to intimidate a mortal might suddenly show his fangs and vampiric features. You still achieve your goal, roughly, but the Beast emerges and taints your victory.
If you scored any 1s on your Hunger dice, AND failed the roll as well, your character must act out a Compulsion. There are standard ones--Hunger, Dominance, Harm, and Paranoia--and there are clan specific ones. The bestial Gangrel are overcome by animalistic behaviors, the rebellious Brujah pick a fight with authority. Basically a Compulsion is the Beast taking over and driving the character awhile. The player is still in control, but must act out the character's darker impulses.
Obviously you want to keep your Hunger under control, and that means feeding. Completely killing and draining a victim will remove all your Hunger dice...but there are happy mediums like taking a pint or two (slaking 2 Hunger dice) or lunching on an animal (removing 1). The lower your generation, and the more potent your blood, the more difficult these half measures become. The stronger you are, the more likely you are to need to kill to keep your Hunger under control.
If you have played Masquerade before everything you remember is still here. You can still call upon your vampiric blood to fuel feats of physical strength and speed, heal damage, etc. You are still vulnerable to the Blood Bond (drinking too much blood from another vampire can form an emotional attachment that makes you essentially 'fang whipped'). Sunlight is still the enemy, and Humanity is something you will struggle with.
In fact, 'Humanity' is front and center again. Rated on a scale of 10 to 0, Humanity measures how strong the 'human' half of you is, as opposed to the vampiric Beast. With Humanity 10 you feel relatively warm to the touch, have an essentially healthy human appearance, and can even eat and drink food (though not live on it). The lower you drop from this, the more corpse-like and cold you appear, the harder it is to pass as living. It becomes increasingly harder to interact with living mortals. At zero, your character is gone, completely consumed by the Beast within.
Humanity is lost by committing acts of brutality or cruelty. It is lost by giving in to the Beast. Thus the vampire in V5 is constantly struggling with Hunger and Humanity, trying to find the balance between the two.
Another interesting mechanic is 'Memoriam.' Vampires are ageless, and even the younger ones can have decades of life behind them. However, the mind cannot hold all that memory all of the time. It would drive you mad. Vampires tend to exist frozen in the moment then, but can dive into their past when necessary with Memoriam. This involves stopping the main story and entering a flashback, something that was a common trick back on TV shows like Forever Knight or Angel. Memoriam can give you bonuses to dice tests ('Wait, I remember, I have done this before...'), answers to problems ('There is an old secret tunnel dating back to Prohibition that will give us access to that building') or even resources ('As I recall I still have a safety deposit box in that bank from my early years, stealing jewels'). It can only be done once a story, but fleshes out the vampire's long unlife in a satisfying and relevant way.
Ah Vampire, how I missed you.
In the summer of 1991 was back from college, running a RuneQuest campaign. We were only about four sessions in when a trip to my local game store changed everything.
On the new arrivals shelf was a strange softcover book with a marbled green cover and a rose on it. The game was called Vampire: The Masquerade. I liked horror games; Call of Cthulhu was an old favorite, and I had been running the new Mayfair version of Chill at university. A game about hunting vampires was intriguing. Reaching out to flip through it, it took a few moments to realize the mistake in my casual assumption. With something akin to mild shock, I realized that in this game, you weren't hunting monsters. You were the monsters.
I bought it immediately.
Understand, there had never been anything like this. I'd been game mastering for over a decade, and games were all pretty much the same; you played heroes, and heroes fought the bad guys. These might be James Bond megalomaniacs or Lovecraftian horrors, they might be orcs, scorpion men, or Stormtroopers...but they were all the villains. Yet here was this weird game, and the damn thing was about being the villain. It was about exploring the nature of evil and essential humanity. I stayed up half the night reading it. It was like discovering role-playing all over again.
Background
Vampire myths are very, very old. How old is difficult to say precisely, as the definition of 'vampire' changes with every retelling, but folkloric beliefs around nocturnal demons or undead who drink blood stretch back at least to the dawn of recorded history. The publication of Bram Stoker's Dracula embedded this monstrous archetype in the public mind permanently; and, in 1976, Anne Vice's Vampire Chronicles (beginning with Interview with a Vampire) cast a look on vampires as sympathetic beings, more cursed than damned.
In 1991, White Wolf Publishing tapped into this rich mythological tradition to create Vampire: the Masquerade. This game did a number of new (or at least uncommon) things with its design, that captured the imagination of players. The game's writing encouraged narrative and drama over combat and challenge. It was strongly themed to be dark, moody, gothic, a game of personal horror instead of heroism. The game's history was long, and deep, and rich, and ever-expanding through supplements building on what was called 'the metaplot', the plot of the world rather than any individual campaign within it.
However, this last point seems to have been the root of White Wolf's troubles. The world's lore eventually became more and more bloated and unwieldy, as did any hope of balancing the game. Eventually, White Wolf decided to wipe the slate clean, and start fresh. In 2004 they published Vampire: the Requiem. VtR shared a lot of its DNA with VtM, but removed Masquerade's metaplot wholesale, in an attempt to shift the focus away from world-shaking events and ancient feuds towards smaller, personal dramatic stories.
Vampire: the Requiem was not generally well received. The drastic reduction in lore complexity made the game more accessible, but also cut out much that fans loved about Masquerade. For many, the neutered Requiem felt too small, too limited, and ultimately just too different compared to what they knew.
That was just the first of White Wolf's troubles, though. In 2006, video game company CCP (makers of EVE Online) purchased White Wolf, with the intent of making a World of Darkness MMO that was scrapped before release. In 2011, tacitly admitting the failure of Requiem, White Wolf published a fourth edition of Masquerade as the '20th anniversary edition'. In 2012, White Wolf said they would stop publishing tabletop RPGs entirely; however, they licensed out the World of Darkness IP (both classic and new) to another company, Onyx Path. In 2015, White Wolf was sold by CCP and bought by Paradox Interactive. And, finally, in 2018, White Wolf worked with distributor Mophidius to publish Vampire: the Masquerade, fifth edition, the topic of this review.
As a disclaimer: this reviewer was only born in 1992. I was introduced to the New World of Darkness in 2012, and never had a reason to pick up a book from the classic game line until now. As such, I cannot give precise details on what has changed from VtM:20th to VtM:5e; but, I can give a perspective on what Masquerade does differently from the most recent edition of Requiem, and whether or not that works.
Lore, Worldbuilding, and Art
So, how does V5 approach the daunting task of creating a second fresh start? It appears to have taken a hybrid approach between older Masquerade's deep lore approach and Requiem's rejection of all metaplot. The corebook name-drops a lot of things that I'm sure are deeply resonant with long-time gamers. Gehenna is approaching, and the Antediluvians are Beckoning the Elders to the Middle East to fight the forces of the Sabbat, at the same time that the Second Inquisition isolates and picks off 'blankbodies'. Characters can be built with 'loresheets', which are hyper-detailed powerups that connect them to some deep element of the world from older editions.
But, you can also just as easily ignore all of that. The world is constructed so that each play group, or even individual players within each group in some cases, can decide how much lore they want in their story. Don't want to deal with Camarilla rules? Play in an Anarch city. Don't care about the difference between a Malkavian and a Toreador? Play a Caitiff, its fine. I really like that flexibility. Metaplot lore is treated like a spice, used to amplify the flavor of the core experience, without becoming the core experience itself.
But I'm gonna be honest, I don't really like the look of this book. Unlike a lot of RPG rulebooks, which rely primarily on hand-drawn art, this book uses an eclectic mix of hand-drawn art, shadow-emphasis photography, and found-material style scrapbooking. The result, to me, is this really chaotic and confusing vision of what the book is supposed to be. That might be intentional, since a lot of the rules do have a lot of 'play it your way' flexibility, but I found it more distracting than helpful. I also don't like the switching between black-on-white and white-on-black printing it uses. In some places, the white-on-black layout is used to indicate sidebars, but in other places that layout is used for core rules or lore.
Core Mechanic, Hunger, and Humanity
The core resolution mechanic is very simple. You take an attribute rated 1-5 and a skill rated 0-5, and roll a number of d10s equal to the total. Any die that rolls 6-10 is a success; a pair of 10s is a critical and adds two bonus successes; and 3 successes is usually enough to get what you want. This is a simple, straightforward bell-curve distribution, satisfying and effective.
At least, it would be, if it weren't for Hunger. See, you also have a Hunger value from 1-5 (rarely, 0, more on that later). A number of your dice equal to your Hunger are turned red on every roll. These dice act perfectly normally, except in two cases. If you roll a critical, and a 0 appears on any red die, it is a 'messy' critical; if you fail and there is a 1 on any red die, it is a 'bestial' failure. In either case, your critical or failure is augmented by a loss of control, as your vampire nature reveals itself.
That's bad, so you ideally want to keep your Hunger low. Problem is, you're a vampire; you need to drink blood to feed yourself. While it's easy enough to slake one Hunger, through a blood bag, or killing a dog, or taking a gentle sip from a human. But once every night, and every time you do a cool vampire thing, you have to make a 'Rouse check', essentially a coin flip of increasing your Hunger by 1. Eventually, the pressure of nightlife means you're going to need to drink more; and when you do, people get hurt. The only way to hit Hunger 0, and blessedly roll zero red dice...is to murder a person and drink them dry.
And that's when you bump into Humanity, the other pillar of the game. Humanity is a morality meter, and losing Humanity means you start to be more vulnerable to vampire weaknesses. Doing bad things gives you Stains; every session where you get a Stain carries up to a 50% chance of dropping your Humanity by one.
What counts as a 'bad thing', though? One of the eternal problems with morality meters in games is that ethics is like, really hard, and is frustrating if players don't agree with the moral rules being enforced. Fortunately, V5 addresses that through its system of Tenets and Convictions. Each campaign of V5, the group chooses a set of three shared Tenets to guide their game. These can be the simple Humanist tenets of 'don't kill, don't torture, don't hurt the innocent' or something more thematic, like the Street Code of 'don't snitch, demand and give respect, don't hurt outsiders'. Additionally, each character has a set of Convictions, which are character-specific beliefs that reduce penalties for breaking Tenets; however, each Conviction has a Touchstone, a human connection your vampire draws strength from, and you have to defend your Touchstones or risk losing the Conviction.
I adore this set of systems. Seeing that creeping Hunger with every roll you make really reinforces the sense of thirst, and drives players to do terrible things that will erode their morality. And yet its all so simple that you can keep it in your head or on an index card in the middle of the table. I'm honestly blown away by how elegant and thematic these rules are--even the Touchstones, the weakest part of this mechanics set, still serves to anchor and connect a character, and forces PCs to fight for their Convictions and evaluate what really matters to them.
V5 conflict systems are, by default, extremely streamlined. By default, you don't even have initiative; everyone just declares an action, rolls simultaneously, and the higher roll does damage. Damage in combat hurts your health, as you would expect. The good news is that vampires can heal near-instantly...the bad news is that doing so makes you very hungry very quickly. As a result, getting in a fight is really expensive, even if you win. In social conflict, damage is dealt to Willpower instead of health, with the audience acting as the 'weapon', and because vampires can't regenerate Willpower any better than a human, this cost feels real too.
The system of 'superficial' and 'aggravated' damage is a simple way to show how tough vampires are relative to human, but the rule about how superficial damage gets halved before actually being marked down is terrible. It's just ripe for miscommunication, whether the GM communicates the damage before or after halving, and if the player remembers that rule.
Personally, I like the de-emphasis of combat, and the social conflict rules are also so simple they can be ignored whenever irrelevant (which is probably most of the time). And in the cases where a knock-down, drag-out fight is warranted, there is a section in the back of the book for advanced combat options if that's more your speed.
Character creation and advancement
Vampires in V5 are built, primarily, around their Clan, their Predator Type, an array of Attributes and Skills, and then a number of Advantages and a couple Flaws.
While your Clan is the most recognizable aspect of your character, it also contributes relatively little to a build mechanically. Your Clan gives you three points of Disciplines, which are cool vampire powers, and gives you your clan Bane, a weakness specific to your vampire family. The book mentions that there were 13 clans, but only 7 are listed in the core book, with them releasing the other 6 one-at-a-time in future sourcebooks. These clans range from the hideously deformed Nosferatu to the beautiful Toreador to the animalistic Gangrel. One special 'clan' is the Thin-Blooded, people only half-cursed, who only get fewer cool vampire abilities, but can avoid some of the costs (like being able to walk around in broad daylight, or eat food without barfing).
Of more importance than your Clan is your Predator Type, the way you hunt. Do you attack homeless people in an alley? Do you subsist on cold bagged blood? Do you seduce and lure strangers into dive bar bathrooms? Whichever option you choose, it gives you a list of powerups and flaws based on what you do. Some lists (like the Sandman) offer low rewards but low drawbacks; others (like the Blood Leech) are min-maxed as fuck.
The skill list is a bit longer than necessary and has some bizarrely pointless entries (Finance? Really?) but it's easy enough to ignore those, and the skill distribution is enough for a character to be capable at enough things to feel fun.
Also significant is your set of Advantages and Flaws. You have 7 points of advantages, and have to take two points in flaws. The lists available for both are pretty short; however, most of the interesting ones are things like Allies and Enemies, Fame and Infamy, social relationships that keep your character tied into the world around them, which is good. You can also donate your advantage point to the coterie if you want to be a team player.
Experience points are supposed to be 1 point per session per player, plus a bonus at the end of a 'story' (with no guidance on how long that is). However, when you consider that the cost to increase each ability is a multiple of the new level, this essentially means that characters improve only extremely rarely. For example, starting with Celerity 3, and trying to upgrade to Celerity 4 (a 20-point purchase) is probably going to take close to three months of weekly games.
This is kind of irritating. I'm okay with having a flatter power curve than D&D, but this is absurd; it essentially means that the higher-level Discipline abilities are NPC-only, because nobody is going to sit around gaining nothing for 20 sessions for a single powerup. Some of the lower-level Discipline abilities are neat, but they mostly feel like minor enhancements. There are very few attainable abilities that feel inspiring enough to build a character around. This is fixable through a simple XP rate boost, but it does still feel like a design flaw, and personally I would overhaul the XP grind entirely.
Lastly, you also have a coterie type. This is analogous to your Predator type, except that it answers the question of 'why is your group of vampires working together'. I appreciate this, since it avoids the awkward 'we meet in an inn' scenario, I just think that groups should choose their coterie type before building individual PCs, to avoid incompatible character groups.
Conclusions and Critique
As someone who has never played Vampire: the Masquerade and enjoys the New World of Darkness (now rebranded as Chronicles of Darkness), I came into this expecting little. I don't care about the deeper Masquerade lore, and that's all I thought would be materially different compared to Requiem.
![5th 5th](https://pawnsperspective.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/brujah.jpg)
But I was, indeed, quite impressed. I don't think I can ever go back to the 'gas tank' approach of using blood as mana, when the Hunger mechanic is so much more immediately appealing. The use of group-defined Tenets instead of designer-dictated sins feels freeing, and opens up the game to a wider variety of styles without losing that core focus on the price of Hunger.
I wish the book weren't as hard to look at, and that the experience system wasn't so punishingly slow for anyone looking to improve their strengths rather than diversify. But I will gladly accept the eyestrain and the effort of hacking together my own XP system if it means seeing my players groan as I hand them another red Hunger die.
My final caveat, though, is actually the first thing in the book. This game is dark, by intention and by design. But, the level of darkness in your game is something you have to very carefully calibrate; what is thrilling for one player might be either boring, or overwhelming for another. This game isn't mechanically too difficult, but thematically you can get into hot water real fast. For example, maybe you don't know that one of your players was a victim of sexual assault in real life, and then you have their character's vampire sire start acting in a way that reminds them of that trauma. This is a game about pushing boundaries, not steamrolling over them, so you need to calibrate your expectations beforehand.
TL;DR: Elegant dice mechanics reinforce the battle between Hunger and Humanity, with flexible, specific design options to let you play the game in a way that fits your table.