In real life, a skill is something that not everyone can do but many people can learn to do given enough practice. Sometimes a person has come innate ability or talent that makes this easier to become proficient or exceptional in, but sometimes a person with no initial innate ability also learns how to do it with enough practice.

When we talk about a skill, sometimes we talk about a skill and sometimes we're talking about a set of skills. Are gymnasts skilled in gymnastics? Maybe. But just because a gymnast is skilled in the high bar doesn't mean they are skilled on the pommel horse or the floor exercises. They have to practice each of them individually. Flexibility, strength, and balance are all needed to be successful, but being good at one does not automatically make one good at the other. But we group them together anyway because there does seem to be a natural grouping that we can make.

Dice Mob groups things as well, mostly because that keeps things simple. Handling things separately would require too much time, paper, and rules. Grouping things together and applying standards to all of our skills makes it easier in so many ways.

In Dice Mob, skills are divided into five different areas: attack skills, defense skills, attributes, knowledge, and special abilities. We will discuss all of these in much more detail, but for now, let's just define what these are in a very general sense.

Attack skills are skills that attack any of the ten defenses: Piercing, Slashing, Blunt, Poison/Disease, Freezing, Burning/Acid, Electrical, Cognitive, Emotion, and Personal. Correspondingly, defense skills defend against those attacks.

Attributes are a grouping of mundane skills divided into ten different natural categories: Strength, Speed, Coordination, Stealth, Stamina, Insight, Perception, Intimidation, Performance, and Persuasion. Although it isn't terribly realistic, it's assumed that each of these categories governs all the skills that might fall under them. Perception, for example, describes how perceptive a character is and both tracking or finding a secret door would both use the number of dice listed under perception.

Knowledge is something learnable. This could include more mundane pieces of knowledge like familiarity with Urban terrains, how to forge metals, appraising items of value, or fishing. It can also include specialized pieces of knowledge in the Arcane, the Divine, Martial Arts, and Psionics. Mundane knowledge is usually learned or it isn't. The more specialized pieces of knowledge (Arcane, Divine, Martial Arts, and Psionics) include a tiered system of increasing knowledge in their use. Knowledge is not knowing how to do something but having practiced the knowledge so as to be able to do it.

The last category is special abilities. Special abilites are abilities that cannot be learned through Skill Points. They are rare and are generally related to either race or culture and often come with weaknesses that counterbalance them.