I did mention "vehemently disagree" for a reason....and while it is probably both pointless and of no great importance, I'll try to clarify what I mean.
I think people are taking my statements a little more extremely than I meant them. I seem to recall something stating that magic defaults to working "here, now, on you" or words to that effect. Basically I think you just have to look at all abilities in sort of the same way.
Certainly two creatures with fly 17 would have similar overall abilities at flying. Of course, no bird would have "fly" skill any more than humans have "walk" skill, so move the comparison to someone who can shapeshift or grow wings, and has fly 17, versus someone who jumps on their invisible breath which is in the shape of a horse. They would presumably maneuver in different ways, and certain moves that would be fairly easy for one would be difficult for another.
Or look at brave. Imagine for a moment that a warrior has brave 17, and for some reason has a squirrel follower, also with brave 17. When facing a small alynx, you wouldn't even make the warrior role, brave skill or not, while the squirrel would—to face a cat is a brave action for a squirrel, but not for a human. Later, they need to try and walk across a rope strung between two towers, hundreds of feed in the air, with a cross breeze. The squirrel doesn't need to make a brave role at all, the warrior might, depending on how the narrator feels about the situation.
In a less extreme case, you need your brave to overcome and fear disadvantages you may have, but someone else without those fears doesn't need their brave in that situation. So brave is still relative to you.
One more example. You and your horse both have "jump 17." In many situations everything is the same—say you are running along and wish to hurdle a moderately wide ditch. On the other hand, to hurtle a man-high hedge at a full run is a challenge for the horse, but certainly possible, maybe a difficulty of 17. For you, it is probably more difficult, certainly you couldn't expect to leap in midstride and keep running easily, so the difficulty for doing that would maybe be more like 10W (on a minor failure you probably do get over, but only by leaping onto it, then dropping to the other side in a less than elegant fashion). On the other hand, you are running alongside a flat-bed wagon, and you want to jump up on it. Not so hard for you, maybe a 14. Much harder for the horse however.
My contention is that in fact pretty much every narrator does make these sorts of relativistic judgments, and just thinks of them as common sense. In no way am I suggesting you abandon common sense, rather I'm saying that insisting that every ability functions the same way for every person and creature in every circumstance actually goes against common sense, and that further it ends up requiring a huge mess of special purpose modifiers and/or excessively detailed ability names (you could give the horse "running forward leap" instead of jump, for example, or put in a rule that four legged creatures get a –10 on their jump when trying to jump sideways).
However, while I admit it doesn't really matter. So long as what you do, how you do it, works in your campaign, that is fine. In no way do I suggest that, even if I convinced you all of the yelmalian perfection of my ideas (which obviously will never happen), that this concept be printed in a rule book. To do so would of course get people confused, offended, and annoyed by it, while left on their own they will most likely apply common sense and come out with something entirely reasonable on their own. Heck, if we could make the rules of Space Opera work well enough to play the game, I'm sure people can use HW/HQ rules in a reasonable manner.
As for me, it provides a frame of reference that I find useful when looking at situational modifiers, others no doubt prefer to look at things through a different frame of reference.
--Bryan
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