Skills vs Items

It might not seem like the skills and attributes a character has, believable skills like acrobatics or more fantastical skills like magic, psionic, technological, or super powers, and the weapons, armor, and other items that a character possesses have anything to do with each other. Most systems, in fact, would say these are different.

In Dice Mob, these are all the same thing. They are generally all modifiers to the Dice Rolls as grouped into our rules sections, i.e. Actions and Initiative, Defense, Hit Points, Mana, Race, Encumbrance, etc. The beauty of making them the same is that a player doesn't need some long description explaining what an item can do nor is there a very finite number of items that have been predetermined for giving to a character. As far as items go, anything goes. A GM picks an item, gives it one or more skills, and voila! A new item!

Swords and guns allow a person to kill more efficiently and often at a distance. Armor protects against more efficient killers. Rope can aid in climbing or restraining an opponent for transport to jail. Magical rings, cloaks, boots, and other items can aid a character through modifying dice rolls, defense, improving initiative, increasing the number of actions, artificially increasing hit points or mana or the rates which those regenerate, shapeshifting the race, or even increasing the encumbrance limit, the same things a skill would be able to do. Items are really just carryable skills, extensions and augmentations of a person’s natural abilities limited only by the number of items which can be carried at any one time.