Vampire: the Masquerade released its fifth edition in 2018. While editions come and go this one was somewhat special as it breaks with prior versions more than any other edition. Revised (3rd) edition ended with the storyteller's choice of Gehenna and White Wolf moved onto the new World of Darkness. When that didn't work out they came out with the 20th Anniversary Edition which was basically a beefed up revised. This was exactly what the old fans wanted, more of the same. Little did they know what was to come.
Fifth edition is a return to first in some ways. It's simultaneously streamlined and ornamented. Gone is the granulated range of successes. Rolls come in three plus one flavors. Roll the dice pool of ten siders and count every one greater than or equal to six as a hit. If your hits reach or exceed the target number the roll succeeds. If you roll two 10s that counts four four hits and if you reach or exceed the target number the roll critically succeeds! Less than the target number and you fail. But where are the critical failures you ask. Well to understand that we need to address hunger. In fifth edition vampires are no longer sloshing blood tanks running through some finite supply of the red stuff. They are hunger incarnate. Blood pools that count down have been replaced with hunger that counts up. Hunger goes from zero to five and for every hunger you replace one of your regular dice with a hunger die. If you fail with a hunger die showing a one it's a bestial failure. More over if you get a pair of tens and reach or exceed the target number but one or both is on a hunger die it's a messy critical. All of this amounts to replacing resource tracking with risk management. More over whether you increase hunger or not is always a dice roll. Gone are the days of optimized combat builds. Your vampire is always a handful of bad rolls away from being reduced to a wretched starving animal.
New mechanics aside what's going on in the World of Darkness. It might be easier to list what's not going on. All of the major intelligence agencies learned that vampires are real based on all of the mass surveillance they were doing over the internet and collectively decided that the world wasn't big enough for so many global cabals of sociopathic parasites and began both independently and collectively informing and arming the Society of Leopold to go nuts. As a consequence half of the major powers are either dead or missing. Clan Tremere's leadership is mostly gone and they're in full on melt down. Clan Giovanni lost (or was abandon by) its founder and has rebranded itself as clan Hecata. The biggest effect has been that the Sabbat decided to stop talking about killing Antediluvians and start practicing it. Everyone who still calls themselves Sabbat has headed over to the Middle East to eat some ancients (Or be eaten by them) which no longer includes clan Lasombra who defected en mas to the Camarilla because what's six hundred years of pure enmity when compared to having to fight Methuselahs in the dessert. Speaking of the Camarilla, they have decided that all of this is a consequence of electronic communication and banned it. Also, you're either with them or against them. Anarchs get bent. The Second Inquisition is too much of an existential threat for them to tolerate that kind of nonsense. Of course it's also too much of a threat for them to wage open war on the Anarchs. Last but not least in all of this is the beckoning which is a psychic pull that is calling the elders to the same region where the Sabbat is hunting. Not all of them are heeding it but enough of them are that it's left a power vacuum. That's the state of vampire politics in the modern nights. Power vacuums everywhere for player characters to try and capitalize on while the storyteller is encouraged to employ fully armed hunters on PCs who think they are too cool for the Masquerade.
The last major change is in the realm of character creation. Thin bloods are an option in the core book. Player characters now distribute fixed numbers of dots to attributes and skills which prevents min-maxing. It's really expensive and hard to get five dots in anything. The power level has been capped and flattened in general. More over, character advancement as written is very slow. On a whole this keeps the game grounded in the personal horror and out of the power gaming optimization trap. All of these choices seem to be working. Despite the extent of the changes the response from the fans both new and old has been mostly positive despite fifth edition being a soft reboot. A running theme of previous editions had been that the powers that be would squish player characters like bugs if they stepped too far out of line. That plus the fact that the metaplot kept fixating on the continent spanning battle between Camarilla and Sabbat in this game of personal horror and you had a slightly bipolar setting. None of that went away but it's off screen for most kindred in North America. Their nights (your nights) are a heady mixture of opportunity and danger where the strongest players are off the board but a lot of niceties are too. Descend into monstrosity, ascend to power, do both, or die another ignominious death at the hands of the monsters that made you. Different rules, same game.
IRON NODER XVI: MORE STUBBORN-HARD THAN HAMMER'D IRON