I was working on a character clan primary mechwarrior and ran into something that either I am just missing, misreading or not clear on.
STR 4
BOD 5
RFL 7 (+1)
DEX 7 (+1)
INT 4
WIL 5
CHA 4
EDG 4
with stats like this clearly there are some interactions with skills
snip
Gunnery: Mech +3 RFL+DEX 8(7) SA
Piloting: Mech +3 RFL+DEX 8(7) SA
Sensor Operations +3 INT+WIL 8(7)/SA
Tactics: Land +3 INT+WIL 9(8 )/CA
now if I am doing this right the skill targets right out of the book are all basically right.
what is confusing me is the effect of extreme stats where the link attributes kick in and matter.
example with these stats and skills is the mechwarrior effectively a 4/4 pilot/gunner or with the link stats each giving a +1 is the charactor effectively a 2/2
I do appreciate pauls reference to page 40.
what confuses me is that if you follow the rules written on pg 40 (ignoring the ATOW vs total war box at the botom of the page)
the charactors targets would be:
gunnery, 8 -1*, -1 REF, -1 DEX -3 skill, =2 piloting would work out the same. * being the phenotype bonus for a clan primary mechwarrior.
I am presuming natural aptitude for piloting and gunnery being SA skills would be lvl 5 traits (each) even though it doesn't apply in this example
my question is why Paul was saying that the atow vs total warfare example that does not happen to list attribute link modifiers becomes (counter intuitively) a ruling that link modifiers DO NOT apply to piloting and gunnery, even though under skill checks it explicitly indicates that it should as piloting and gunnery rolls would be skill checks, (and frankly if they do not apply why would anyone pay the 300 additional xp on attributes to raise from a 4 to a 7 to get that little +1 when you could get a minimum of 3 full levels or up to 6 levels of lower ranked skill)