I havent seen a straight answer for this question so I’ll ask it here:
If an addiction such as Jet gives you a debuff to AGI tests (specifically, +1 difficulty on all AGI tests), does that include attacks with Small guns? Ive seen posts say that Skill tests and attack rolls are different, and others say they are the same.
In my eyes, an attack roll is a type of skill test, but i have always played that attack rolls and general skill tests were separate. Similiar to Rage in D&D that gives a Barbarian advantage on STR skill tests, but that doesnt include STR-based attack rolls.
yes, the penalties (and benefits) of chems, clothing, etc. all affect attack rolls if your attack rolls use those attributes. An attack roll is just a skill test using a weapon. This can be seen first on page 14 with the table “dificulty test examples” and an example of a dificulty 1 test is “shooting a target at close range” (it should add with a close range gun, as the range penalties are based on the range of the gun). This implies that shooting (an attack) is a type of skill test.
This is more explicitly stated in chapter 2: Combat on pg. 27: making an attack. Here it says choose a weapon and target, then “attempt a test”. Under this it says “melee weapon: roll a str + melee weapons test”. It says test for every example (melee, ranged, thrown, unarmed) and specifies the skill and atrribute of the test. Therefore yes, attack rolls are all tests.
Yes this means if you have a close range laser pistol and you took orange mentats first, it would reduce the dificulty to hit someone at close or medium range to 0 hitting automatically (dificulty 1-2=0 or 2-2=0), and you would only need 1 success to hit at long range (dificulty 3-2=1). Yes, this makes chems very powerful (and their side effects or addictions very painful), but chems cost a fair bit for single use items, so this makes sense.