Along with knowing the dice rules themselves, understanding attacking and defending is the most important thing to know about Dice Mob rules. It’s all about pitting certain attacks or skills against resistance to them. A wise player will want to increase the number of dice they roll and decrease the number of dice rolled by their opponent to stack dice comparisons as much to their advantage as possible.

To improve the number of attack to defense dice ratio, a character can do a variety of things from choosing certain types of weapons to using the element of surprise to choosing a method of attack that exploits a monster’s weakness to improving their proficiency with their go-to weapon or spell. Some of this can be done between adventures when a character levels up, some by choosing the weapons, armor, or items they are going to take with them on a particular campaign, and some can be done on the fly as they assess an encounter and make the necessary adjustments to use high ground, the element of surprise, ground cover, monster vulnerabilities, morale, magic, darkness, and other factors to turn the tide in their favor.

No matter how many advantages and disadvantages a character or monster might have, the number of dice can never be decreased below one die or increased above whatever maximum the campaign has determined.

Attacks and defense are two sides of the same coin, and although we've mostly spoken of attacks up to this point, we actually spend much more time in game play actually speaking of defense. Attacks are really just methods of exploiting a defense, or lack thereof. In fact, one of the prominent parts of a character's sheet or a monster's statistics is dedicated to their defenses.

Defense is divided into three areas: physical, mental, and personal. And these are further subdivided as shown below into the ten defenses which will be listed on a character sheet.

• Physical
  • Force
    • Piercing (1)
    • Bludgeoning (2)
    • Slashing (3)
  • Elemental
    • Poison / Disease (4)
    • Freezing (5)
    • Burning / Acid (6)
    • Electricity (7)
• Mental
  • Cognitive (8)
  • Emotional (9)
• Personal (10)

Physical defense protects against attacks that do damage based on some external factor colliding with or reacting with a character or monster’s physical body. Defense against physical attacks is by far the most common type of defense characters will use in adventures. For convenience sake, physical attacks have been subdivided into force attacks and elemental attacks, both of which themselves are subdivided and explained below.

Fists, bullets, swords, improvised weapons, falling long distances, ceilings crashing down on characters are all examples of “attacks” requiring force defense rolls. Attacks against force defense can take a variety of forms, sometimes causing heavy amounts of surface bruising damage, sometimes causing long thin gouges in the exterior of the character, and sometimes doing small but penetrating damage that doesn’t affect much of the exterior of a character but can do significant damage to the interior. We’ve chosen to divide them in that way and name them with the following: bludgeoning, slashing, and piercing.

Why subdivide force defenses? Why not treat them all the same?

Although many times, characters and monsters are equally resistant to any form of force trauma, some types of armor or monsters might be more resistant to one versus another. For example, skeletons are highly resistant to piercing attacks (because they are just animated bones with large gaps between them) whereas they have a standard resistance to slashing and bludgeoning attacks. Other opponents, like slimes, might be resistant to bludgeoning attacks while being affected normally by slashing and piercing attacks.

Elemental defense–for lack of a better term–is the ability of a creature and its clothing and other defenses to defend against damage based on temperature, chemical, or other similar external factors that aren’t related to force at all. Often they’re related to a character or monster’s reaction to something that their body isn’t equipped to handle. Elemental attacks are subdivided into poison or disease, freezing, burning or acid, and electricity.

Any elemental attacks not listed here should be categorized to the closest matching category. Undead who might be particularly vulnerable to light, for example, would be characterized under burning or acid because the effect it has on that creature's body is similar to what a normal creature might experience when encountering fire or acid.

Mental defense protects against attacks directed upon an opponent’s mind. Although they might not necessarily have any outward manifestations of damage or trauma, attacks against mental defense can be every bit as effective in turning the tide of a battle as those against force or elemental defenses can be. Magical and optical illusions can trick opponents into wasting attacks or fleeing from far inferior forces. Charm skills can make foes into friends and friends into foes. Successful attacks against mental defense can end battles without a single drop of blood spilled.

Mental defense usually takes one of two forms, protecting against the ability of the brain to do logical and cognitive processing or protecting against the alterations to the emotional state of the brain. We subdivide them thus, as cognitive and emotional.

Cognitive includes the way that the brain processes stimuli from its senses to make logical sense of what is going on around a character or monster as well as to make logical decisions based on that stimuli. Magical and optical illusions, auditory illusions, feeblemind, blindness or deafness caused by magic (as opposed to force damage), hold spells, and domination are all examples of mental attacks against cognitive defense.

Emotional also includes the way in which the brain processes stimuli, but this usually isn’t in a way to make a logical decision based on those stimuli. Instead of making a logical reaction of fleeing from a superior foe, a mother might choose to stay and fight to protect her young that wouldn’t otherwise survive or be able to flee quickly enough without her presence, even though she might also die in the process. Happiness, sadness, fear, and other emotions fit in this category, and defense against alterations to these emotions are what constitutes emotional defense. Charm, fear, and morale fall under this.

This defense is harder to categorize, but it has to do with violations against a person’s sense of self or their personal space. Often the easiest way of thinking of what this is is by thinking of what it isn’t, a defense against physical harm or a defense against mental manipulation. Polymorphing, pickpocketing, slow, weaken, and pretty much anything that harms adversely affects an opponent without causing physical or mental damage would be covered under personal defense.

In the case of an attack that affects multiple attack types, like a flaming longsword that would do both fire and slashing, or a poison bite, that does both poison and piercing, the attackers and defenders roll each attack type individually, as if they were separate attacks. The flaming sword, for example, might do three dice of slashing and three dice of fire. The defender might defend with five dice against slashing and three dice against fire.

Although it isn't always the case, many (if not most) attacks require the primary attack to be successful before any others have an effect. A totally unsuccessful snakebite would never require a character to actually make any sort of defense roll against poison. Nor would an unsuccessful attack with the flaming sword mentioned above require a flame defense if the sword itself caused no damage. Generally it should be obvious if one is dependent on another or if they both effects attack in parallel, but if not, the GM should make their best judgment.

In rare cases, a character or other creature may have more than just a strong defense to a certain ttack type. They may be totally immune to its effects. Attacking a fire-breathing dragon with a fireball spell, for example, is futile, assuming fire-breathing dragons are immune to fire in the universe in which your characters are roaming.

If an attack consists of multiple attack types, such as the flaming sword mentioned above, the fire portion of the attack would be ignored, and only the piercing or slashing of the sword would have any effect on a fire-breathing dragon.

Attacking penalties are rare. Usually when someone defends better, dice are added to defense. It isn't so much a penalty to the attacker as how well a defender defends themselves. With that said, there are cases where an attacker can receive penalties. These occur when the attacker cannot see the defender well… or even at all or if the character is trying to attack in a style that would require training over and above what proficiency would cover.

When an attacker is blind or a defender is invisible, the results are essentially the same. For the rest of this section, we'll refer to the defender as being invisible, but this section applies for both conditions.

Invisible creatures can't be attacked at all unless they are first detected. And they can't be attacked effectively unless the attacker is attacking in the proper direction, which requires either blind luck or successfully finding the person with senses other than the eyes.

To detect an invisible opponent, the character must first make a perception win-loss roll against the opponent's stealth. As long as a creature is invisible and moving, this perception win-loss roll would have to be made every round to detect where the creature has moved to in order to attack them again. The GM can opt to forego the win-loss roll on the first round if there is a reasonable chance the attack would be in the correct direction, such as shooting an arrow down a narrow tunnel. And the GM can also forego the perception roll on any consecutive round if there is sufficient reason to do so.

Whether or not the GM decides there should be a win-loss roll, the attacker automatically has a -4 dice penalty to all attacks. Skills (e.g. blindfighting) can modify this penalty, but otherwise all attacks are penalized with a four dice penalty.

In the case of actual invisibility, it should be noted that just because a character attacks or is attacked does not necessarily mean that they lose their invisibility. If the invisibility is from a spell, the creature might have to make a skill check to retain concentration on the spell. If the invisibility is from a magical item or cloaking device, it might last as long as it is not damaged. It should also be noted that some attacks might require the invisibility be removed in order to use the attack, such as whether or not a Klingon Bird of Prey can attack while cloaked, which should be governed by the rules of the use of that skill or item, not by any arbitrary invisibility requirement itself.

This section regards partial invisibility or cloaking of the defender, partial blindness of the attacker, obscurity in the environment (such as clouds or smoke), or camouflaging elements of the defender.

This is similar to the above section except that the person is not totally beyond seeing, they just aren't immediately obvious because the vision has been partially impaired or disrupted (e.g. sand in the eyes, smoke cloud, incomplete cloaking, or continually effective camouflage). As shown in the above section, they must first be detected, but after they have been detected, the penalty to the attacker would be at a -2 instead of the -4.

So long as the defender remains within sight, the win-loss perception roll would not have to be rolled again until they managed to re-hide themselves, but the attacker would still have the -2 penalty until conditions improved.

It's one thing to be able to wield a weapon. It requires an extra level of training to wield two weapons at the same time and in such a way as to be effective with both. The benefits of dual wielding are obvious–two attacks when a creature would generally only have one. But to do so effectively requires training, and without the training, the creature is less effective with both weapons. For more on dual wielding, see Dual Wielding Mundane Knowledge and Dual Wielding Weapon Proficiency.