Core Rules

One Roll Runs the Night

Vampire: The Masquerade 5th Edition uses a single dice mechanic for nearly everything a vampire does: seducing a mark, kicking in a door, lying to the Prince, holding back the Beast. Learn that one roll and the rest of this page is detail. The detail matters, though, because V5 builds its horror into the dice themselves. Your hunger sits inside every pool you roll, and the hungrier you are, the more often the Beast decides how you succeed or fail.

This page covers the full rules engine: pools and successes, Difficulty and margin, criticals, Hunger dice, Willpower, Rouse checks and Blood Potency, conflicts and damage, Humanity and Stains, frenzy and Compulsions. Every probability on it was worked out exactly, by counting every way the dice can land, not by simulation. If you want to try the numbers yourself, the Dice Roller rolls V5 pools with Hunger dice and shows the same exact odds.

Dice Pools and Successes

V5 uses ten-sided dice. When your character attempts something where failure is interesting, the Storyteller names the two traits that fit and you add them together. That total is your dice pool.

• Usual pool: Attribute + Skill. Sneaking past a guard is Dexterity + Stealth; reading a liar is Wits + Insight. Now and then the Storyteller pairs two Attributes instead, when no Skill fits.
• Disciplines: a vampiric power tells you its own pool. Some add dice to a normal roll, some replace the pool entirely.
• Modifiers: the Storyteller adds or removes dice for circumstances, and Blood Surge (below) can add more.

Roll the whole pool at once. Every die showing 6, 7, 8, 9 or 10 is a success. Dice showing 1 to 5 do nothing on their own. Each die succeeds exactly half the time, so on average a pool produces half its size in successes, a little more once criticals are counted.

Difficulty and Margin

The Storyteller sets a Difficulty: the number of successes you need. Most simple tasks are Difficulty 1 or 2, hard ones 3, and demanding feats 4 or more. If your successes equal or beat the Difficulty, you win.

The successes beyond the Difficulty are your margin. A win with margin 0 means you scraped by; a big margin means you did it with style, did it faster, or learned something extra. In a fight the margin becomes damage, so it matters a great deal.

Criticals: Pairs of Tens

A single 10 is just one success. But every pair of 10s counts as four successes: the two dice themselves plus two bonus successes. Three 10s are one pair (four) plus a lone 10 (one), for five. Four 10s are two pairs, for eight.

A critical win is a winning roll that contains at least one pair of 10s. It means something exceptional happened: you did more than succeed. A pair of 10s on a roll that still misses the Difficulty is not a critical win, though the four successes may well get you there.

Failing, and Winning at a Cost

V5 separates two kinds of failure:

• Win at a cost. You rolled some successes but fewer than the Difficulty. The Storyteller may offer you the win anyway, with a complication: you get through the door but leave evidence, you persuade the ghoul but owe her a favor, you catch the thief but take a blow doing it. You can take the deal or accept the failure.
• Total failure. You rolled no successes at all. Things go wrong, often in an interesting direction.

There are no botches in V5. The worst result a normal roll can produce is the bestial failure, which comes from your Hunger dice, not from 1s on your ordinary dice.

Hunger Dice

Every vampire has a Hunger rating from 0 to 5. When you roll a pool, a number of its dice equal to your current Hunger are swapped for Hunger dice, usually red dice. They are not extra dice: a pool of 6 at Hunger 2 is four normal dice and two Hunger dice. If your Hunger is higher than your pool, every die is a Hunger die.

Hunger dice count successes exactly like normal dice. They only change what a roll means in two situations:

• Messy critical: you score a critical win and at least one of the 10s in it is on a Hunger die. You succeed, critically, but the Beast chose the method. The Storyteller describes a win that is violent, cruel, reckless or revealing: the door comes off its hinges, the bribe becomes a threat, the punch breaks a jaw you meant only to bruise. Messy criticals can cost you Stains, Masquerade trouble or a Compulsion.
• Bestial failure: the roll fails and at least one Hunger die shows a 1. You fail and the Beast lashes out in the failing: you snarl, smash something, bare your fangs, or the Storyteller hands you a Compulsion. A 1 on a Hunger die in a roll that succeeds does nothing at all.

Read those two definitions closely, because fan summaries often get them wrong. A messy critical still counts a pair of 10s as four successes, no more. A Hunger die showing 1 does not make a roll fail; it only turns a roll that already failed into a bestial one.

How Often Does the Beast Show Up?

The table below gives exact odds at Difficulty 3 for pools of 3 to 10 dice. The surprising part is the second column: Hunger never changes your chance to win. Hunger dice succeed just as often as normal ones. What Hunger changes is the kind of win or failure you get. Each Hunger column shows the chance of a messy critical / the chance of a bestial failure.

At Hunger 0 there are no Hunger dice, so messy criticals and bestial failures cannot happen at all. Three patterns are worth remembering:

• Small pools and high Hunger are where the Beast lives. With 3 dice at Hunger 3, more than a quarter of all rolls (26.8%) end in a bestial failure.
• Big pools mostly trade bestial failures for messy criticals. With 10 dice at Hunger 3 you almost never fail bestially (2.2%), but 15.5% of your rolls are messy criticals: you win, and the Beast wins with you.
• At high Hunger nearly every critical is messy. With 3 dice at Hunger 3 every die is a Hunger die, so all 2.8% of critical wins are messy.

Willpower Rerolls

Once per roll, after seeing the dice, you can spend 1 Willpower (mark one box of Superficial Willpower damage) to reroll up to three of your normal dice. You choose which ones, usually the failures. You can never reroll Hunger dice, so Willpower cannot erase a Hunger 1 or move a Hunger 10. What it can do is add enough successes that the roll no longer fails, which defuses a would-be bestial failure. Willpower rerolls do not apply to Rouse checks.

The gain is large. Assuming you reroll your failed normal dice, up to three:

The last row shows the catch: at Hunger 5 a six-die pool has only one normal die left to reroll, so Willpower barely helps. A starving vampire has very little self-control to spend.

The Blood: Rouse Checks, Hunger and Blood Potency

Rouse Checks

Whenever you call on the blood, you make a Rouse check: roll one die, never a Hunger die and never with a Willpower reroll. On a 6 or higher nothing happens. On a 1 to 5 your Hunger rises by 1. It is a coin flip, 50% each way, every time. You make Rouse checks when you wake each evening, when you use many Discipline powers, when you Blood Surge, when you mend damage, and when you fake being alive with the Blush of Life.

The coin flips add up. A vampire who makes three Rouse checks in a scene has only a 1 in 8 chance (12.5%) of keeping their Hunger where it was, and gains 1.5 Hunger on average.

The Hunger Scale

Feeding lowers Hunger. How much depends on what you feed on and your Blood Potency; drinking more than a little from one mortal puts them in danger, and only killing them takes you to 0. That is the cruelty built into the scale: perfect calm costs a life. Feeding & Frenzy covers hunting in detail.

Blood Surge

Before a roll, you can make a Rouse check to Blood Surge and add dice to that one pool. The bonus depends on Blood Potency (table below). If the Rouse check fails, the extra Hunger arrives after the roll, so the surged roll itself uses your old Hunger. A surge can turn a long shot into a fair bet: 4 dice at Difficulty 3 win 32.8% of the time; surge two more dice in and the 6-die pool wins 66.6%.

Mending Damage

Vampires heal by spending blood. Once per turn you can make a Rouse check to mend Superficial Health damage; the amount depends on Blood Potency. Aggravated damage is far slower: one point per night, at the cost of three Rouse checks. With three checks there is a 7 in 8 chance (87.5%) that healing one Aggravated wound costs you at least 1 Hunger.

Blood Potency and Generation

Blood Potency runs from 0 to 10 and measures how thick and powerful your vitae is. It sets your Blood Surge bonus and mending, adds dice to Discipline pools, lets you reroll Rouse checks for low-level Discipline powers, raises the severity of your clan Bane, and makes ordinary blood less satisfying, so old vampires must hunt harder. Blood Potency 6 and up is the territory of elders, not player characters.

Being allowed to reroll a Rouse check halves its risk: Hunger rises only if both dice show 1 to 5, a 25% chance instead of 50%.

Generation is how many steps you stand from Caine. In V5 it only sets the range your Blood Potency can occupy. A typical new character is 12th or 13th Generation with Blood Potency 1; an ancilla is 10th or 11th with Blood Potency 2; thin-bloods are 14th to 16th Generation with Blood Potency 0. Generation gives you no blood pool and caps none of your traits.

Conflict and Damage

Conflicts

When two characters work against each other (a brawl, a gunfight, an argument before the Primogen) both sides roll their pools. Whoever rolls more successes wins, and the winner's margin over the loser's successes is the damage dealt. If the two sides tie, both take 1 point of damage, as if each had won by a margin of 1. There is no separate damage roll.

Conflicts are meant to be quick, finishing in about three turns. Each turn, close combat resolves first, then ranged attacks, then anyone newly joining the fight, then everything else.

Health and Willpower

Every character has two trackers:

• Health = Stamina + 3 boxes. Physical harm lands here.
• Willpower = Composure + Resolve boxes. Spending Willpower, social defeats and mental strain land here. At the start of each session you recover Superficial Willpower damage equal to the higher of Composure or Resolve, and pursuing your Ambition and Desire restores it during play.

Both trackers take two kinds of damage:

• Superficial (mark with /): bruises, cuts and most bullets. A vampire halves Superficial physical damage, rounding up, before marking it. Mortals do not.
• Aggravated (mark with X): fire, sunlight, and the claws and fangs of supernatural creatures. It is not halved and heals slowly.

Impairment and Torpor

When every Health box holds damage, you are Impaired: −2 dice to physical pools. Any further damage turns an existing Superficial box into Aggravated. When every box is Aggravated, a vampire falls into torpor, a deathlike sleep; a mortal dies. A full Willpower tracker impairs you in the same way, but in social and mental matters.

Worked Rolls

Two coterie members show the rules in action: Imogen Vale, a Toreador gallery owner, and Dario Kessler, a Brujah bouncer. Both are Blood Potency 1.

Humanity, Stains and Remorse

Humanity runs from 0 to 10 and measures how much of the person survives inside the monster. New characters usually start at 7. High Humanity lets you pass for human more easily: the Blush of Life comes easier, you can keep food down, and mortals warm to you. Low Humanity makes you colder, stranger and easier for the Beast to steer. At 0 the Beast owns you outright and the character is lost.

The Moral Compass

• Chronicle Tenets are the troupe's shared moral rules, agreed in Session Zero, such as "Do not kill" or "Protect the innocent." They define what counts as a sin in this chronicle.
• Convictions are your character's personal rules, one to three of them, such as "Never abandon a friend."
• Touchstones are living mortals, one tied to each Conviction, who embody what your character still cares about. Harming a Touchstone, or letting harm come to one, costs Stains.
• Ambition (a long-term goal) and Desire (a short-term want, often tied to a named character) drive your Willpower recovery.

Stains and the Remorse Roll

When your character breaks a Chronicle Tenet or one of their Convictions, or harms a Touchstone, they take Stains; the worse the act, the more Stains. Stains are marked in the empty boxes of the Humanity tracker, from the right.

At the end of the session, a character with Stains makes a Remorse roll. The pool is the number of boxes that are neither filled by Humanity nor marked with a Stain. If any die succeeds, the character feels genuine remorse: Stains clear and Humanity holds. If none succeed, Stains clear but Humanity drops by 1. Taking more Stains than you have empty boxes is degeneration: you become Impaired and suffer Aggravated Willpower damage.

Example: Imogen has Humanity 7, so three boxes are empty. Her alley video costs her 2 Stains, which leaves 1 clear box. Her Remorse roll is a single die: a 50% chance to keep Humanity 7, a 50% chance to fall to 6.

Frenzy

Frenzy is the Beast seizing control outright. V5 names three kinds:

• Fury frenzy, triggered by rage, humiliation and provocation: the Beast attacks.
• Hunger frenzy, triggered by the smell or sight of blood when starving, or a forced Rouse check failed at Hunger 5: the Beast feeds.
• Terror frenzy, or Rötschreck, triggered by fire and sunlight: the Beast flees.

To resist, roll current Willpower + one third of Humanity (rounded down) against a Difficulty from about 2 to 4, depending on how strong the provocation is. "Current Willpower" means your unmarked Willpower boxes, so a vampire who has spent or lost Willpower is easier to push over the edge. The frenzy roll uses no Hunger dice, and you cannot spend Willpower to reroll it. It is not Composure + Resolve; that formula comes from other games.

You may also choose to give in and "ride the wave," letting the frenzy happen rather than rolling. Either way, the character acts on the Beast's terms until the frenzy passes, and comes back to themselves amid whatever wreckage it left.

Compulsions

When the Beast surfaces without seizing full control, usually from a bestial failure or a messy critical, the Storyteller can inflict a Compulsion: an urge the character must act on. Until it is satisfied, rolls that don't serve it take a penalty, commonly two dice. The four general Compulsions are:

• Hunger: you must feed.
• Dominance: you must assert control over someone in the scene.
• Harm: you must hurt someone, physically or emotionally.
• Paranoia: you must treat everyone as a threat.

Each clan also has its own Compulsion, which the Storyteller can pick instead: the Brujah's Rebellion, the Toreador's Obsession, the Ventrue's Arrogance and so on. Caitiff and thin-bloods have none. Clans & Disciplines lists them all.

The Whole Roll at a Glance

Every ordinary test resolves in the same order. Willpower rerolls happen before you read the result.

Try It at the Table

Grab a handful of d10s, or open the Dice Roller, and work these out.

1. Reading a Roll

A pool of 6 at Hunger 2 against Difficulty 4. Normal dice: 10, 5, 7, 2. Hunger dice: 10, 1. What happened?

2. Saving a Bad Roll

A pool of 5 at Hunger 3 against Difficulty 2. Normal dice: 4, 3. Hunger dice: 6, 1, 2. What is the result, and what are the odds a Willpower reroll rescues it?

3. Holding Back the Beast

A vampire with 6 Willpower boxes, 2 of them marked with Superficial damage, and Humanity 8 is insulted in front of their sire. What pool resists the fury frenzy?

4. The End of the Night

A character with Humanity 6 has 3 Stains at the end of the session. How many dice is the Remorse roll, and what happens on a failure?

5. Know Your Odds

Using the table above: you have 7 dice at Hunger 3 against Difficulty 3. How likely is a bestial failure, and how likely is a messy critical?