If you haven't already, I highly suggest you take some time to "tinker" and play around with your vBulletin templates. As long as you've got a good grasp of HTML and programming concepts (you don't even need to know programming as most of the things in your templates can be figured out with just a bit of logic).
Just a tip .. create a subset of your current template and tinker with that one so you can always fall back to the original.
Give yourself a good couple of days to just "discover" the power and flexibility of templates.
I fall into the middle ground of not being a programmer but tend to still be able to figure out the logic of things through trial and error. As you can see from my site, I've managed to do some extreme template modifications and even if it likely takes me more time than a professional programmer, I'm at least able to get much of what I want done.
As skipppy said though .. you'll need some basic knowledge of HTML .. but on a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being word processing and 10 being programming ... HTML is about a 2 or 3 .. any Teach yourself HTML in 24 hours book will be more than enough for you to start understanding vBulletin's templates!
