Since the thread has been awakened from torpor, here are some answers the original questions:
No, Vampire 5 no longer has soak rolls. Instead, your health track is based on your Stamina +3. So a tough character can take more damage, but they don't negate damage.
In close combat, both combatants roll a relevant dice pool, and the winner deals damage to the other equal to the margin of success plus a bonus of up to 4 depending on the weapon. Damage can be either superficial or aggravated – there's no "lethal" category anymore. For mortals, superficial damage mostly consists of unarmed attacks and non-lethal weapons like tasers and everything else is aggravated, but vampires also treat most non-supernatural attacks as superficial. Superficial damage is halved before applied to your damage track.
Disciplines work a bit differently. Each dot confers one of two or more powers, and it's rare that anything just adds your discipline rating to something (though some powers have that as an effect). For example, the first level of Fortitude can be either Resilience (add Fortitude to your health track) or Unswayable Mind (add Fortitude to rolls to resist social/mental influence, both mundane and magical). At higher levels, some powers might require you to have a previous power or sometimes even a power in another discipline. For example, there's a level 2 Fortitude power that lets you share some of your Fortitude powers with animals you have used Animalism on, and of course that requires that you have Animalism first.
It is more common that disciplines require blood, but not every power does. Having a high Blood Potency lets you roll twice when making a Rouse check for powers below a certain level.
Blood Potency replaces most of the aspects of generation, but there's a correlation between the two (e.g. a generation 12-13 vampire has Blood Potency 1 to 3, while a generation 7 vampire will be in the 3 to 7 range). Blood potency generally increases by 1 per 100 years of age, but you can also increase it with XP. As far as I can tell, you can't start with either Generation or Blood Potency other than the campaign default. Blood potency affects:
- Blood surge (replacing the old ability to spend blood to boost physical stats for a scene, now you can roll a Rouse check in order to add a number of dice to any check).
- Mending superficial damage (low potency requires a Rouse check for each point of damage, higher potency can mend 2 or maybe even 3 for PC-available levels).
- Bonus dice when rolling to use or resist disciplines.
- "Advantage" on Rouse checks to activate discipline powers below a certain level.
- How severe your clan weakness is.
- At higher levels, reduces or eliminates entirely the amount of hunger animal and later even human blood slakes.
I think the most ingenious part of V5 is how Hunger works. Instead of having a blood pool to spend and refill, you have a number of Hunger dice that take the place of other dice in your pool when making rolls. They work mostly like regular dice: 2-5 is a failure on that die, and 6-9 is a success (V5 doesn't have changing target numbers like old-school Vampire – a more difficult thing requires more successes).
If you fail and you rolled any 1s on the Hunger dice, that's a Bestial failure, meaning you failed because your Beast manifested somehow, which means you may have to act on various compulsions and/or get some more prosaic penalty like a hunger increase or something. Note that 1s are not anti-successes anymore.
Normally, rolling two 10s on your dice is a critical, counting as four successes total (so two bonus successes). Should any of those two be a hunger die though, that will be a Messy Critical. You still get four successes for it, but you do so in a way that causes trouble somehow. If you were fighting someone, maybe you used some obviously supernatural way of defeating them, revealing your nature. You might commit some heinous deed, gaining Stains (risking Humanity loss).
And it does say Obfuscate still affects smell. So even if he did smell? He can hide it.
