Iron will and negative pass-effects. Loophole?

Question

Yesterday I played a game of Battlestar Galactica: The Board Game with all expansions. We got the crisis card "Reactor Critical" (from the Daybreak expansion), with a difficulty of 7, and the effects:

Pass: The current player draws 2 Treachery cards
Fail: -1 Fuel

Now, both the pass and fail effects are negative. However, I had the leadership card Iron Will (from the Exodus expansion) on my hand. It is a skill check card which reads:

Skill check: If total strength is within 4 of the difficulty, do not trigger the fail effect. If total strength in this skill check is 0 or less, lose 1 morale

The first part of this card is very interesting. If you don't pass the skill check, we should of course not trigger the pass effect. However, if we get 2-6 points, the effect of Iron Will triggers, meaning we should also not trigger the fail effect. So neither of the negative effects from the skill check should be triggered.

Have I understood this correctly, or is there some rule I have not seen?

Btw, the skill check failed massively, so we didn't bother discussing it.

Answer 1

You're correct.

However, Iron Will's second part will still trigger and cause a loss of morale if the check is 0 or less (e.g. if you Jury Rigged on a 7 check and get 0).

Iron Will doesn't make you pass. It just stops the labelled fail effect from triggering. It isn't a loophole in general; sometimes you miss out on good stuff on the pass, occasionally you can avoid bad stuff on the pass.

Note that if you have a 12 check with an 8+ effect, Iron will won't stop the 8+, only the effect labelled with "fail".