A Quick Reference For The VtM Jargon You Keep Seeing
If you've spent any time in VtM communities, you've probably hit a wall trying to parse a forum post or spreadsheet where everyone's typing AP, BP, CP, DOT, and half a dozen other two-letter combos. The game's acronym sprawl is ugly, inconsistent across editions, and frankly some of it exists only because early adopters were lazy with their keyboards. This is a full scope rundown of what these actually mean when people use them in practice. I'm going to be straight: a lot of VtM abbreviation guides you find online are copy-pasted from 2004-era message boards with zero fact-checking. Some are just wrong about which edition something comes from. I'm not going to do that. What follows is organized by what the acronym actually tracks in play, not by which rulebook it first appeared in, because that's how people actually use them. Before getting into the letter combinations, you need to know what system you're looking at. The acronyms shift meaning depending on the edition. WoD means the entire World of Darkness franchise. VtM is Vampire: The Masquerade specifically. V:tM (with colon) usually means Revised Edition from 2004. V20 is the 20th Anniversary edition that came out in 2011. V5 is the current Edition Five. Each of these uses the same base terminology but sometimes treats the numbers differently, which is where a lot of confusion starts.
SotC shows up sometimes as a shorthand for the Story of the Crown sourcebook, though you'll see it used incorrectly to mean "Storyteller system." Don't assume someone means the game system when they type sotc in a forum post. Context matters. Chronicles of Darkness (abbreviated CoD or CofD) is the alternate world line. Mummy: The Curse and Werewolf: The Forsaken both use the same base mechanics but have their own acronym sets that sometimes bleed into VtM discussions because the same players run multiple lines.
The Point Economy
This is where acronyms get crowded because they describe three separate currencies in play. AP = Avatar Points. This is your experience currency. In VtM Revised and V20, the term was XP, but a lot of veteran players never adopted that shorthand. AP is more common in V:tM and early online play. It's the same thing. You spend it to raise attributes, skills, and supernatural abilities. BP = Blood Points or Blood Pool. This is your vampiric resource pool. When someone says "I'm at 3 BP" they're telling you how many blood points they have available to burn on powers, regeneration, or resisting damage. This is NOT the same as the later Blood Potency abbreviation, which is usually just Potency or written as a Roman numeral (II, III, V). Don't confuse "my BP is low" with "my Potency is low." They track entirely different things.
Get the Full Details
CP = Coin Points. This is the VtM internal economy. Money in VtM is tracked in CP rather than dollars, and the conversion is roughly 1 CP = $100 in game terms. A full bank vault might hold 50,000 CP. You'll see this most in V:tM and V5 where the economics of maintaining a mortal front are tracked mechanically. If a player is negotiating with a mortal contact and suddenly mentions "that'll cost me 200 CP," they're talking about in-game money, not XP or blood. RP = Reputation Points or sometimes Reach Points depending on the chronicle. In most V20 and V5 chronicles, RP refers to Social Influence within the Camarilla or Sabbat hierarchy. This is NOT the same as Known or Status — those are character sheet traits. RP is a meta-resource that some Storytellers track for faction standing.
Time, Turn, and Mechanical Abbreviations
DOT = Down On Time. This is a widely used shorthand for tracking how much time a character has before something ends — a Disciplines power, a wound penalty, a social encounter, whatever. More commonly, DOT appears in the phrase "DOT roll" meaning a roll made under time pressure or with a ticking clock. Some chronicles use DOT to mean Days of the Month tracking for lunar-based effects, but that's rare. TB = Ten Black Days. This is a specific storyline event from the V:tM storyline, not a mechanical abbreviation. You'll see it referenced in older campaign discussions and sourcebook cross-references. If someone says "during TB" they mean during that particular arc. ML = Merit List or sometimes Minor Larceny depending on context. In V20 and V5, Merits are tracked by the ML abbreviation in character sheets. The Merits and Flaws system is the backbone of character customization in modern VtM, and most players shorten it to ML on shared spreadsheets and character trackers.
DF = Damnation Factor. This is a V:tM-era mechanic (mostly Revised) that measured spiritual degradation. It was removed in later editions but shows up constantly in older forum discussions and homebrew rules. If you're running a V5 chronicle and someone asks about DF, they may be confused or running a house-ruled system. Clarify first. CoM = Chain of Command. Used almost exclusively in Sabbat chronicles to describe the hierarchy of authority. Not a mechanical term — it's organizational jargon from the setting itself. You'll see it in character backgrounds and in-story documents more than on actual sheets.
Character Sheet Shorthand
ATTR = Attributes. Divided into Physical (ST, DX, TN), Social (CH, WP, MG), and Mental (PER, INT, WIS). Don't abbreviate these inside the game — full names prevent mistakes at the table. ATTR shows up on summary sheets and in design documents. SKILL or SK = Skills. Same three categories: Physical (AT, BA, FI, LW, PM, RW, TG), Social (DG, Et, IN, PB, RC, SV, VC), Mental (AC, Cr, Ft, In, Lk, Mn, St). In casual play most people just say "my Athletics is blank" instead of tracking sk abbreviations. The shorthand exists mainly for quick reference and character-building software. Disc = Disciplines. This is the standard abbreviation and it's nearly universal. Dom = Dominate, Pot = Potence, Pre = Presence. If someone says "I have Dom III, Pot II, Pre I," they're listing their Disciplines at a glance. These abbreviations are stable across all editions.
Clan traits often get abbreviated too. AN = Nosferatu, BR = Brujah, CA = Toreador, MM = Malkavian, MK = Malkavian (older sourcebooks used MK before AM became standard). This inconsistency is one of the more annoying parts of VtM acronym history.
Community and Meta Abbreviations
MC = Mechanical Condition or Master of Ceremonies. In VtM forums, MC usually means the latter — the person running a particular event or convention. But in actual gameplay notes, it refers to Wounds and Conditions tracking. Context is everything here. WOTC = White Wolf Original Collection, referring to the early print runs of V:tM corebooks. Not to be confused with Wizards of the Coast, which acquired White Wolf in 1998. The abbreviation WOTC appears in collector and vintage sourcebook communities and means something totally different there. If you see it in a buying/selling thread, it's the former. In a rules discussion, someone may have misspoken. COT = Circle of the Therians. A Sabbat clan group referenced in various sourcebooks. Appears mostly in lore discussions, not mechanical ones.
SC = Sabbat Church or Storyteller's Chronicle. Yes, same abbreviation, different meanings. The Sabbat Church is the organizational structure of the Sabbat. A Storyteller's Chronicle is the running campaign. If someone writes "SC notes" in a forum, they could mean either. Ask.
A Specific Problem I Hit
About three years ago I ran into a situation where I was cross-referencing a V20 character sheet with a V:tM rule document for a conversion project. The sheet listed the character's BP as 12, and the rule doc had a section titled "BP Thresholds" for determining blood pool maximums. I spent an entire session trying to reconcile them before realizing the rule doc was using BP as Blood Potency (which in V:tM is a static rating of I through X) while the character sheet was using BP as Blood Points (the living resource pool that fluctuates). The workaround was simple but tedious: I wrote a cross-reference table for my own chronicle that listed every abbreviation alongside its full definition and which edition it applied to. I keep this on a shared doc for anyone joining my table. It took about twenty minutes to compile and has saved me from five misunderstandings since. If you're running a chronicle with players who mix editions or borrow rules between games, do the same thing. The alternative is arguing for forty-five minutes over whether AP means Avatar Points or Achievement Points (some homebrew systems use the latter).
Where These Break Down
No acronym list is complete without acknowledging where it fails. VtM abbreviations are weakest in two areas. First, homebrew and chronicle-specific shorthand. Every Storyteller invents their own shortcuts, and there's no standard. If a table uses HP for Hunger Points and another uses it for Hit Points (a misnomer that shouldn't exist in a Storyteller game), you're going to have problems. There's no central authority here. Second, the Revision Gap. V:tM (2004), V20 (2011), and V5 (2018) each made changes to how certain systems are labeled. Willpower is WP across all editions, but in V:tM it was sometimes called Stamina Will in official errata, leading to SW appearing in old documents. Humanity is always Hum, but some chronicles running the newer Conviction system (V5's replacement for some Humanity functions) use Con ambiguously — which could also mean Concentration or Covenant. If you're trying to translate a character from one edition to another, don't trust abbreviations. Translate the full terms. The shorthand is designed for people who already know what they're talking about, and it punishes anyone trying to bridge editions without doing the work.
What to Do When You're Stuck
When you encounter an acronym you don't recognize in a VtM context, the fastest path to clarity is usually asking the person who used it what edition they're running. Most confusion evaporates once you establish whether someone is talking about V:tM, V20, V5, or a homebrew variant. After that, check the Storyteller System or Storyteller Deluxe reference sheets — these exist for every edition and contain the official abbreviation tables. For a complete standalone reference that covers all major editions, the VtM Acronym Compendium is available through various community archives. It's not officially published by Paradox, but it's maintained by longtime players who flag edition-specific usage. The version I found most useful was the 2023 revision, which corrects several errors from the 2019 original regarding V5-specific shorthand. I keep a copy bookmarked and reference it whenever a new abbreviation surfaces in a discussion. The point isn't to memorize every acronym. The point is to know enough to ask the right clarifying question when you see something unfamiliar, because the VtM community has been building its shorthand organically for over twenty-five years, and it's messy by design.
