It might not seem like the skills a character has, the magical, psionic, technological, or super powers they are endowed with, and the weapons, armor, and other items, magical or otherwise, that a character possesses have anything to do with each other. In fact, in most systems these are treated wildly differently.

In Dice Mob, these are all the same thing. They are all modifiers to the sections we’ve described above, namely Dice Rolls, Actions and Initiative, Defense, Hit Points, Mana, Race, and Encumbrance. And when it really comes down to it, all of these ultimately just come down to the very first thing we talked about, Dice Rolls.

In the case of magic, be it actual fantasy magic, psionic abilities, space opera technology, paranormal prowess, alchemical concoctions, magical dust, or comic book superpowers, they really are just skills. Sure they’re likely unnatural or even supernatural skills, but they are skills all the same. And we are going to treat them as such.

In the case of items, these are just skills as well. They are extensions and augmentations of a person’s natural abilities. 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.

There aren’t really a whole lot of differences between skills and items. Items can be swapped out more easily for another item whereas a skill isn’t so easily attained or discarded. Items may be limited to what a character can carry. And items don’t necessarily have a level associated with them. (They do have degrees, which we’ll discuss later.)

We’ve been alluding to this for a while, but here is how the dice for skills are added up. Everybody, proficient or non-proficient has a change of performing most skills. (See the non-proficient skill section below for more explanation). We call this “two for trying”. In other words, they always start off with two dice.

If a character is proficient in a skill, like swordfighting or hiding in shadows, they get two more dice or “two for proficiency” in using that skill. They are that much better than someone who has never trained in it.

Then a character gets one additional die for each degree of proficiency. You can never be zero degree proficient, so any character proficient in something would get to roll at least five dice. From here, items like swords or boots of stealth could provide additional dice to boost them even further.

And defense works exactly the same. A first degree defensive proficiency against fire would be worth five dice whereas no proficiency would only be two dice.

The only exception to this is healing and healing-related skills. Non-proficient characters still roll two dice (two for trying) and proficient characters still roll five dice (two for trying plus two for proficiency plus one for degree one), but each degree beyond that counts as five dice rather than a single die, i.e. a third degree healer would roll fifteen dice. (Obviously if the healing is spell-related non-proficient users can’t even attempt it, so this would only work for natural methods.) Also, this doesn’t have to be healing related to hit points. Healing of mana or any other skills that always “succeed” and only need a degree of effectiveness would also be handled this way.

Note: In case it wasn’t obvious, proficiency ONLY applies to skills a character has learned or knows instinctually. It doesn’t apply to items of any sort. A sword isn’t “proficient” in and of itself unless it’s some sort of sentient blade that wields itself.

Each character is allotted ten skill points to start with and gains three more skill points as they level up. (We’ve briefly mentioned this in the levels section.) Skill points can be used to add a new skill or they can be used to level up a particular skill. To avoid confusion, we call these skill levels “degrees”.

A character might be a first degree archer or a first degree tracker. This means they are proficient in archery or tracking, but they aren’t as proficient as someone who has practiced even more than they have… or in other words, a second degree archer or a second degree tracker. Degrees aren’t limited. But the higher the degree, the harder it is to attain. Here’s how it works. Becoming proficient in a skill (first degree) costs one skill point. Advancing from first degree to second degree costs two skill points. Moving from second to third, three points. Etc.

Easy, right?

If you wanted to create a new character who is already a second degree swordfighter, you would add the degrees together (one plus two equals three). That means three of a character’s initial ten skill points have gone towards swordfighting. Initial degrees are fairly easy to obtain. Moving into higher degrees of proficiency, a fifth degree swordsman or a seventh degree natural healer, requires a lot of skill points.

So why would someone want to spend two points moving from a first degree swordfighter to a second degree swordfighter rather than learning two new skills? For multiple reasons.

First each degree of skill adds an additional die. A proficient (first degree) character rolls five dice. Second degree, six dice. Third degree, sevend dice. And so forth. (As a rule of thumb, it’s “two for trying”, “two for proficiency”, and one for each degree of proficiency.) And that doesn’t even count the sword itself.

But that’s not all. Additional degrees also allow characters to do things they couldn’t do as lower degrees. But we’ll discuss those more as we get into the actual specifics of skills, spells, and items.

One more thing before we move on to everything that skills, magic, and items have in common and how we use them. We call these non-proficient skills.

Sometimes a skill could technically be performed by someone who hasn’t practiced much or at all with performing this. Examples of non-proficient skills include swimming, climbing, running, throwing, tracking, etc. Even someone not at all practiced with these skills would be able to attempt it and often succeed at it. Someone non-proficient at a task generally rolls two dice. (Two for trying, as we say.)

Example: Jane, a degree five swordswoman would have nine dice, “two for trying”, “two for proficiency”, and five for her degree of swordsmanship, when using her trusty longsword. And that doesn’t even count her longsword’s effectiveness against whatever she was attacking. If she has her longsword knocked from her hand and had to pick up a fallen branch to fight with, she would do so with only two dice since she isn’t proficient with branches.

Example: If our swordswoman Jane, also happened to be a degree one staff wielder, the GM could determine that the branch is close enough to a staff and thus she is proficient with it, even though it is an improvised weapon and not really a properly hardened and balanced staff, thus giving her five dice for the attack.

For anything that a person wouldn’t be expected to accomplish unless they were practiced — magic being a good example — they would roll zero dice.

Well, we’ve listed of the basics many times, namely Dice Rolls, Actions and Initiative, Defense, Hit Points, Mana, Race, and Encumbrance. And we’ll go into specifics on what kinds of skills and items might affect each of these, but there are a host of other skills and items that wouldn’t fit under these at all but would fit under many standard campaigns. This is by no means an exhaustive list, but as we break down how skills and items affect the game, let’s also consider the following:

• Physical Attributes
  • Brute Strength
  • Fitness
  • Foot Speed
  • Hand-eye Coordination
  • Body Mechanics
  • Perception
• Trades
  • Thievery / Stealth
  • Entertainment
  • Politics
  • Merchant
  • Crafting
  • Scholar
• Tactics
  • Ambush
  • Battlefield Maneuvering
  • Mounted Combat
• The Original Elements
  • Air
  • Earth
  • Fire
  • Water
• Natural Phenomena
  • Light, Darkness, and Shadow
  • Life and Death
  • Plants and Fungi
  • Sound and Music
  • Space
  • Time
• Summoning

Like was mentioned before, this is by no means an exhaustive list and more modern games might choose to add additional or subdivide the above, such as the original elements, into more granular areas of skill. Some of these might require something beyond the abilities of a normal human while others are easily within the scope of what we might do today or in the near future.

No skill is an island. Having a skill with one thing could affect other skills a character also has. Or maybe even skills they don’t have. A fitness skill would affect a foot speed skill, especially at longer distances. A proficiency with a staff could provide implied proficiency with improvised weapons like branches. Skills with plants and herbs can affect a natural healing skill. A skill in weaponsmithing could allow the character to be at least proficient (roll three dice) with any weapon he would have smithed often. A skill with woodcarving could allow a character to carve a crude bow or arrows in a pinch, even if they aren’t really a bowyer or fletcher.

But a word of warning. Just because a GM could make a complex system of skills interacting with other skills doesn’t mean they should. Most of this should be decided on the fly, especially at it usually just allows another die per degree of the skill or otherwise increases the duration, area of effect, or distance of the skill being augmented. A complex system of skills can make for a tedious character creation process and defeats the purpose of making this system easy for anyone to pick up and use. Keep it simple. But have fun too.

Akin to skills affecting other skills in a single character, they can also affect each other in a party.

We’ve probably seen in books, movies, and television shows where magicians pool their powers to make much stronger attacks. In real life, people with the same skills can work faster and better through cooperation. In most RPGs, they don’t even try to handle something like this. In Dice Mob, this is super easy. Both characters must have prowess in the same skill, e.g. fire magic, but then they just add their extra dice together, two dice to try plus one die per degree of prowess for all of the characters involved. The levels, where appropriate, are also added together to determine range, area of effect, etc.

When determining which form of a skill can be used, it would be the highest degree of one of the involved characters, not a sum of the degrees.

Example: A trio of magicians want to burn down an orc encampment with a firestorm. Even pooling their powers, at least one fourth degree magician would be required, assuming that the storm version of fire magic required at least a fourth degree magician to cast. (We’ll talk more about elemental magic and how the various degrees work later.)

So why would characters want to pool skills? Because two second degree fire magicians could roll eight attack dice (“two for trying”, “two for proficiency”, two for one magician’s skill degree, two for the second magician’s skill degree) against a single opponent instead of six dice and six dice. If the opponents are weak, rolling only three dice of defense, it would be better for each character to attack separately, i.e. divide and conquer. But if an opponent is particularly powerful, for example an eight defense against all attacks, eight dice attacking the opponent have a much better chance of causing at least some damage than the two characters acting individually. Also the additional range could mean the difference between hitting an enemy and having the spell fizzle out early.

With defenses, this would work the same way. But the players would again have to decide whether it’s worth it for two characters to throw up two defenses (each with their own two “try” dice and “proficiency” dice) or to pool their powers to throw up a single pooled defense.

And some pooling of powers just doesn’t make sense. Mental powers, for instance, can’t usually enhance one another, nor does it make sense for someone to lend a hand in dodging an attack.

As we’ve mentioned before, each skill degree adds one more die to the dice rolled to accomplish a given skill. We’ve also mentioned that sometimes an additional skill degree also has other effects. These vary greatly based on the type of skill, but when it comes to magic or magic-like effects, it is generally handled with the following effects:

• First Degree: Self/Touch
• Second Degree: One-dimensional object at a distance
• Third Degree: Two-dimensional object at a distance or two one-dimensional objects
• Fourth Degree: Three-dimensional object at a distance or three one-dimensional objects
• Fifth Degree: Two two-dimensional objects at a distance or four one-dimensional objects

The distance away something can be affected, thrown, or shot (as applicable) are measured at 1 meter per level of the skill-user.

Example: A magician with first degree fire defense magic can make himself or the character touched immune to fire. A second degree magician can make a person at a distance immune to fire. A third degree magician could create a shield to protect anyone behind it from fire. A fourth degree magician could surround a group with a sphere or other three dimensional object to protect them.

One dimensional objects aren’t really one dimensional in the actual sense, but they are generally considered as something which is only large enough to affect one opponent at the end of it. A character with the second degree fire attack skill could conceivably shoot/hurl a grenade, arrow, bullet, or even spear-sized object at an opponent as long as they weren’t trying to use it in a way as to affect more than one opponent.

Two-dimensional objects are 1 sq meter per level of the caster. Two dimensional objects are generally walls or floors, but they could be circles, squares, hexagons, or whatever other shape a character wants them to be as long as they are of a level sufficiently high to make them as large as they need to be.

Three dimensional objects are 1 cubic meter per level of the caster. Three dimensional objects can be cubes, spheres, half spheres, elaborately shaped prisms, or any other three dimensional objects that make sense.

Example: A magician with first degree fire attack magic can cause things to start on fire by touch, including candle wicks, swords, arrows, or clothing. A second degree can hurl the fire in the form of fireballs or light things like campfires or candles from a distance or weapons. A third degree could use it to create walls of fire or two fireballs. A fourth degree could use it to create firestorms.

Does that mean a fourth-degree skilled character could make a key of a substance they are skilled in? Yes, theoretically, provided they know exactly how that key should be shaped. They couldn’t just say that a key is shaped right to fit the door lock they are looking at. They’d have to have some knowledge of how the inside mechanism of that lock functioned. And the substance they used would have to be something that could affect a lock without destroying it.

The length of time a skill can last is one round per level of the caster (but it drains an equal amount of mana each round as it did when it was initially cast). Skill Degrees in Items Many items also have skill degrees, though this generally only affects the number of dice rolled for whatever skill is manifested by the item. Rather than list them in degrees, we list items by the following adjectives which describe them:

• First Degree - Lesser
• Second Degree - This is the default or standard version of the item, so no adjective is listed.
• Third Degree - Extra
• Fourth Degree - Greater
• Fifth Degree - Super
• Sixth Degree - Ultra

In the case of attack or defense, the number of dice rolled is generally the same as other skills, two for trying plus one per degree of the item. If this is adding onto an attack or defense that is already being used, the die of the degree alone is added to the other dice.

Example: A first degree fire magician drinking a potion of extra fire would roll two dice (for trying), two for proficiency, plus one die for their degree plus three dice for the potion being “extra” or third degree. Or eight dice total.

If this isn’t an attack or defense, but is just a no conflict roll, as is the case with a potion of healing or mana, the number of dice rolled is five dice per degree (as we mentioned in the opposing rolls section above.)

In the case of skills that required some level for the determination of distance, duration, or size, the following is used as a general rule of thumb:

• Lesser (First Degree): As if performed by a second level character
• Standard (Second Degree): As if performed by a fifth level character
• Extra (Third Degree): As if performed by an eight level character
• Greater (Fourth Degree): As if performed by a twelfth level character
• Super (Fifth Degree): As if performed by a twentieth level character

Just because something might be entitled magic, doesn’t mean everything has to be shot out of fingers, hands, or feet toward the intended target. If a player wants to change things up for their character, they can toss around alchemical potions, magic dust, draw sigils with their fingers, a paintbrush, or chalk, sing, or any number of things to invoke the magic. There’s no penalty to any of these methods of attacking other than what’s already limited. In fact, it might be a lot of fun to not just do magic via handwavium and command words.