Dodge - Active or Passive?

[McAllister]

Dodge must be an active defense, because you can't use it against an attack you were not aware of: if it merely represented general evasive movement, you'd be able to dodge any attack as long as you were in combat. Just look at Campaigns p. 374: "A 'dodge' is an active attempt to move out of the perceived path of an attack... A dodge against [a ranged] attack represents an attempt not to be where you think your opponent will shoot, by weaving or ducking at the right moment."

Dodge must be a passive defense, because there are no iterative penalties to more than one use per turn: if it actually represented intentional movement, there would be some sort of limit on the number of times you did it in a second. Just look at Martial Arts p. 122: "It simply means that you’re moving unpredictably in combat, leading your adversaries to misjudge your position and miss some of the time. You’re only actively ducking blows if you try an Acrobatic Dodge, retreat, or dodge and drop."

So, how to reconcile these different views of dodge? I'd like to bring back* the Passive Defense.

*I've never played 3e, so it's not really "bring back" so much as "reconstruct from secondhand mentions and guesswork"

Active Dodge (called Active Dodge to distinguish it from the current Dodge aka Vague Dodge) uses the better of (DX/2)+3 and BS+3 [should I pick one?]. It can only be used if you're aware of your opponent. Each successive dodge is at a cumulative -1 penalty. Retreating and all the other options mentioned in the MA quote, only apply to Active Dodge. This is essentially pretty similar to existing Dodge.

Passive Defense doesn't exist if you're not in combat: if all you're doing is jogging around a track while a sniper lines up a shot, the sniper will have a penalty based on your speed, but you're not actually going to evade this attack. Passive Defense is based on Basic Speed. Not Basic Speed +3, just Basic Speed. However, when you select a maneuver in combat, you can A. give up 1 yard of movement that the maneuver would have given you and/or B. take a -1 penalty to all actions undertaken in this round** in order to add +1 to your Passive Defense until the beginning of your next turn. You're not just running in a straight line, you're bobbing and weaving; in addition to trying to find an opening to attack with your sword, you're also ducking and feinting half-steps to throw your opponent off. The maximum bonus you can obtain this was in a realistic campaign is +3, and in a cinematic campaign it's half your BS rounded up.

**If you try to increase PD on the same round as you take a Recovery Event (as per Last Gasp), your recovery gets a penalty equal to the PD bonus.

My inclination is to say that Feint, Deceptive Attack and other options that penalize Active Defense rolls should also penalize Passive Defense rolls, but that's based more on game balance concerns than any sort of logic. As I wrote above, a human with DX16 and HT16 could realistically buy BS up to 10 (and boost it to 13 with evasive movement), and trying to hit that person without any mechanism to reduce the defense roll would be really frustrating. Would I be better off changing the idea of Passive Defense from a defense roll to an attack penalty? But then how would I prevent it from stacking with Active Defenses? I feel like I'm on the verge of something here, but it's not quite coming together.