Vampire 5th Edition Info

ALL OF THIS IS SUBJECT TO CHANGE IN THE FINAL PRODUCT

Only 3 Attributes - Physical, Social and Mental, 1-5 dots
Specialities for these Attributes like Strength, Charisma etc (the old atts) and others that were not old Atts add one die
Skills pretty much unchanged 1-5 dots
TN nearly always 6
Difficulty is now number of succs. needed
Disciplines are activated by "Rousing the Blood"
This means you add all your (red) Hunger die to the pool (they replace ordinary die). We started with 1 die.
Hunger die only added to skill based pools (including pools that use skills for disciplines) but not others like willpower.
Hunger die track 1-5
Hunger increased during play, but it happened to me only once and I cant recall the mechanical cause
Hunger went to zero when someone fed
Victims sometimes gave a small bonus to trait rolls (eg. the homeless guy gave a die for the next stealth roll I think). This was even when partially drained.
Each 1 on Hunger die triggers a Compulsion
Compulsions are clan based and the consequences situation based and were randomly generated. Our hungry Toreador walked into a burned out haven and became entranced by the beauty of the destruction. Police then crept up on him.
Compulsions could be overcome with Composure, but this left you with less Compusure to counter with should a Frenzy occur later.
Frenzy occurred when more 1s came up together (I think)
Willpower was 1-5 and could be spent to reroll all the failed dice, so long as there was at least one success
Humanity was in there at 1-10, but was not tested or afaik used in the beta, the focus was on other mechanics
Characters also had advantages like backgounds and merits, but these too were not a focus of play
The focus was really on how the mechanics and storytelling aspects of play integrated with one another
Im not going to give my views as I want that to brew for a while and to submit it to the offical feedback place first
The story was very dense - I dont think any table completed it in the 4 hours of play - and was a direct follow up to the events of the Enlightenment in Blood LARP which concluded the night before. The story became the first event of the new VtM metaplot.
It was set in Berlin in the current nights during an Anarch uprising that saw the final death of Breidenstein and numerous other vampires as well as follow up trouble coming from the Inquisition. We were all Camarilla neonates trying to find the vampire who had blood bonded us all. It was a clusterfuck. There were several classic moments in the story where the Hunger mechanics produced a genuine 'Vampire' moment.

I made one reporting error in my earlier post, the Anarchs are being forced out of the Camarilla, of course. But its a changed Camarilla, almost broken. The Anarchs are basically turning on a tyrannical, despotic organisation. The events in Berlin were the catalyst for a global change, as the Anarchs pulled the Camarilla to its knees here last week.
Generation was still in development but the idea talked about was that it would be less discernable and more difficult to know which generation your character or anothers actually was. Line of descent may be growing murky to the characters.
Gehenna (the actual events of any ToJ metaplot) was not revealed but my sense is that V5 will feature a selection of elements from ToJ blended togther into a new version of Gehenna which for now we only know as the Gehenna Wars.
The two looks for vampire I mentioned are cosmetic looks, nothing more. Vampires in Elysium dress (and act) differently. This I feel is a nod to the LARPers, who like to really go to town on a look that would often shred the Masquerade on the streets. Elysium is now a place where they can let their monsters show and relax.

on combat - oh yeah! mostly between the characters as the situation was really intensive and desperate.
You could rouse the blood to increase any Attribute not just Physical. Also to heal.
Damage was really interesting, it came as either Superficial or Aggravated. Anything that could conceivably kill you was Aggravated for you. Aggravated damage was also very slow to heal.
You didnt take any penalty or injury until a certain level was reached (5 I think) then you took a nasty consequence that was dependent on the type of damage used.
The fighting was between the coterie members, the coterie and the German armed forces, the coterie and some very well equipped dudes who were likely New Inquisitors, and the coterie and some Anarchs. It worked well and was entertaining.
By the way, a little bird sitting in the middle of the nest told me that EDOM from Nights Black Agents were being ported or adapted into WoD...check out The Dracula Dossier for more on that little insight...and you'll realise this could easily be and probably will be part or even the heart of the New Inquisition.

The "big thing" that it seemed like this was a testbed for is the Hunger system as a replacement for Blood Points. The basic idea is that rather than decreasing the amount of blood you have you increase the amount of hunger you have. Rather than spending Blood Points you instead "Rouse the Blood" to accomplish a variety of things (basically all the same things you spend blood for under the current rules). A few subtle but important inclusions are that you must Rouse the Blood to awaken each night, any vampire must Rouse in order to not appear dead, and all uses of Disciplines require Rousing. You keep track of how many times you Rouse the Blood in a scene and at the end of that scene you roll that many dice. Any dice that don't roll a success add to your Hunger (a scale of 1-5). Any time you make a skill roll or skill-based Discipline roll you have a number of dice in your pool replaced by "Hunger dice," equal to your Hunger rating. These dice function like normal dice and can contribute successes, but if any of them roll a 1 you gain a temporary Compulsion from your Beast (note that 1s do not subtract from successes in these rules so you aren't getting double-whammied or anything). Compulsions are tics of your predatory vampiric nature that can vary in severity depending on the number of Hunger dice that rolled a 1. In the game I ran a Toreador was overwhelmed with strong emotion for someone in the scene, a Ventrue felt compelled to assert his dominance and leadership over the group, and another Ventrue felt incredible anxiety at the lack of order and structure they had without guidance from their superiors. These were all pretty minor Compulsions and we didn't have anyone fail badly enough to pull one of the nastier ones (though one character was walking around with 4 Hunger for a bit).
Hunger is reduced by feeding, shock of all shocks. There was a scale that told you how much Hunger was removed by feeding on what. IIRC animals removed 2 and feeding on a human without killing them removed 3. Feeding on a human and killing them in the process removes 4 and is also the only way to reduce your Hunger below 1 (temporarily), otherwise all vampires are assumed to always have at least 1 Hunger.
Honestly, it worked pretty well and everyone I talked to seemed to feel likewise. It needs refinement, something even Karim said in a couple conversations I had with him, but the core concept and system is actually surprisingly thematic and functional.

In this set of rules the extent of "you are what you eat" was getting small, temporary bonuses from feeding on certain people. They said this is something they want to continue with but are still developing a proper system for. At this point though assuming the final system for that has broadly similar outcomes to the listed effects in the playtest it doesn't seem like that addition to the system is going to be as huge and game-changing as some people were thinking.

The other addition that was generally a hit (with exceptions I'll talk about) was "Success With Consequences," wherein if the number of successes you rolled fell exactly one short of the number you needed you could choose to succeed but have the ST add in some complication or consequence. It only happened a couple times at my table and worked well both times. Other people I talked to reported similarly with the exception of one table where it apparently happened so often it became cumbersome to the flow. Seems like something that depends a great deal on the fall of the dice and the kinds of things the ST decides to throw in.

Of note
The attributes/specialties is directly lifted from MET VtM.
Superficial/Aggravated Damage is lifted directly from MET VtM's Normal/Aggravated damage (though I like the term superficial).