> > The HQ resolution system says that two abilities of two acting parties
>are
> > pitted against each other in a contest, with each party having it's own
> > goal.
>
>More strictly, it says that one has a goal, and the other is trying
>prevent this. Sometimes in practice the situation is more symmetrical
>than this, or the two goals are almost at right angle to each others,
>but the resolution system assumes you start off with one active party,
>and hence one goal.
I'm looking at the rules, and they don't say this. It says that there are usually two contestants, and that your hero's ability is opposewd by some resistance. This resistance, it says can be active or passive, By active, it says that it means some opponent with their own ability, or by the transitive property that any ability use by the opponent is active. In the section Contests: Victory and Defeat, it points out that a marginal success for you is a marginal failure for the opponent.
In all these cases it implies that each side is equal in the contest - there's no indication that either side is passive. The only thing listed as passive are things like heights of trees, etc.
Now, that's not to say that I don't think that if you have a Toughness charm that it's use isn't passive in some sense. Just that when something is active or passive is a judgment call.
>I think the distinction intended is that if you're trying to Speak
>Eloquently to accomplish some discrete goal of your own, it's "active";
>if it's used simply to thwart someone else's, it's a "resistance".
If one side says that their goal is simply to stop the other side from succeeding, then it's passive? That would be a very discernable demarcation, but it would mean that if I said I was using my Speak Eloquently to stop you from beating me up, that it would be passive, if that were your goal. Meaning that I think that "augment only" abilities are going to be used very often as "active" abilities.
Hmmm. Terminologically that's odd - to make an automatic augment work actively (as the primary resistance), it has to be used passively.
Mike
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