[RPG] How to learn World of Darkness canon if I’m not using the rules system

When your Incapacitated health box is filled with damage (of any sort), you become Incapacitated. Any further damage past Incapacitated, whether from the same attack or a later one, sends you into torpor, unless it is aggravated, in which case you meet Final Death.

Bashing and lethal damage to a vampire in torpor typically don't do anything, although enough (decapitation, removal of the heart, etc) will still result in Final Death. Note that this is different from most other World of Darkness games in that there is no "wrap-around" where bashing damage converts to lethal and lethal to aggravated when damage off the chart is suffered. In fact, vampires don't even mark bashing and lethal separately, they just treat them both as "normal" damage and mark them both with the same slash.

The first thing to do is dispense with the idea of "dodging outside of your Initiative order." The only time you'd need to dodge is outside of your Initiative order, since if you're dodging, you're not the acting party. What's most often being referred to in those circumstances is "dodging when you don't have an action dedicated to defense." In those cases, you can make a Willpower roll (or spend a Willpower) to change a previously declared action to a "dodge." (The combat system, remember, presumes that you'll assign actions in Initiative order and resolve them in reverse order. In a forum, you may not be using that rule.)

In Werewolf: the Apocalypse 20th Anniversary, the use of Willpower to convert a previously declared action into a defense is on page 289.

In Werewolf: the Apocalypse Revised, aborting to a dodge has no cost, as per page 205 and 206. "A character can choose to take one of three defensive actions as well. She may also choose to abort a previously declared action in order to do so.[…] Normally, once a player has declared an action, she may not change it. If she has a good reason to do so (a packmate kills her character’s intended target, for example) she may change her action, but she adds one to the difficulty. Aborting to a defensive action does not change the difficulty of said action.")

Now, if you have no more actions left in your turn to spend, you have nothing to abort or change and may not dodge. This is a very good reason to spend Rage on extra actions at the start of your turn.