In Dice Mob, offense is used in a very generic way to describe the use of a skill or item against an opponent. Offensive actions could involve an attack with a sword or a crossbow, but they also include trying to persuade someone to do something or beating an opponent in a friendly arm wrestling competition. For simplicity's sake, offenses are generally grouped by the type of defense that defends against them, so we won't go into too much detail here on different kinds of offenses and how they work. Those will be treated more under the defenses themselves.

Offense has both the “attacker” and their opponent roll dice with the number of wins of the attacker either causing damage or determining that the “attack” was successful. More on this in the Combat Rolls section.

Suffice it to say that offenses can't be improved directly with Skill Points, can only be performed with Combat Actions (unless otherwise specified), and will be mentioned here and there throughout the manual mostly in relation to the skills and items which perform offensive actions toward others.

One more thing that should be mentioned is that offensive actions aren't always of one type and one type only. A poisoned dagger could cause both piercing and poison damage. A flaming torch could be used as a weapon to cause both blunt and burning damage. Magical items can often cause multiple types of damage as well. To see more on how these cases are handled, see Multiple Attack Types for more information.

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.

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.

Ss long as they remain 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.