Has anyone houserulled parrying/dodging?

It seems a little off to me that someone who rolls a 01 on the to-hit roll can have their blow completely avoided by someone who succeeds on their parry/dodge roll by just a single point.

I ruled that it was based on opposed degrees of success, for Melee anyway.

Say Mr Fighty has a WS of 60 and is hitting Mr Sorepants who has a WS of 45.

Mr F rolls a 15 to hit, and Mr S rolls a 15 to parry.

Mr F has 4 DoS vs Mr S' 3 Dos.

Mr F still hits.

This changes the dynamics on things quite a bit, to the extent where a high-WS fighter will pretty much prevent a regular Joes (not to speak of poor Adepts) from ever managing to avoid a hit.

There was a long discussion on this over on the DH 2.0 Beta forums, and lots of people voiced their opinions. It turns out changing this has some pretty big ramifications, and in the end FFG concluded with not going that way

I ruled that it was based on opposed degrees of success, for Melee anyway.

Mr Ork (WS 50) charges into melee with a Berserk Charge (+20) with his Best Quality Weapon (+10 WS). He is accompanied by a bunch of squigs (which having higher Initiative charge first), so he gets another +20 from outnumbering 3-to-1.

His effective WS is now at 100, scoring an average of 5 DoS.

Good luck dodging that

We've been running it where it becomes an opposed test the moment the attacker rolls something under his fully modified WS/BS where the dodging/parrying party wins ties. I didn't realize that may have not been the intended method but we've been doing it a long time that way and it works pretty great I think.

My party has enjoyed it thus far. It works both ways, so they can game it just as much as I can.

Good luck dodging that

My Void Master has an effective dodge of 128 (88 Agi, +10 Dodge, Flip Belt), I'm sure he'll manage

I ruled that it was based on opposed degrees of success, for Melee anyway.

Mr Ork (WS 50) charges into melee with a Berserk Charge (+20) with his Best Quality Weapon (+10 WS). He is accompanied by a bunch of squigs (which having higher Initiative charge first), so he gets another +20 from outnumbering 3-to-1.

His effective WS is now at 100, scoring an average of 5 DoS.

Good luck dodging that

Sounds about right. If an attack gets 5 (or more) DoS I think it should be harder to dodge than an attack roll that just barely succeeded.

I don't directly disagree, just be aware that this skews combat into even further advantage towards the skilled combatant, and is deadly punishing to those less-skilled (note, less-skilled, not un-skilled).

If this is what you want, then go ahead. But note that while this might "make sense", it does not make for a "balanced game", and might be terribly un-fun to many classes. Why spend lots of XP on expensive Dodge skill as a non-combat optimised class, when you know the fighters you'll end up trying to evade are going to nix your Dodges anyway?

It might be costly (in terms of XP) to get a Dodge skill in the 40s, but a 40% chance of evading death might make it worth it. With your proposed changes, that's no longer a 40% chance, but a highly variable one running from 0 to 40 depending on the skill and luck of your attacker.

Again, you're not wrong. The TT game uses opposed rolls as the core mechanic, and other games do so too. But changing the systems Core mechanic does more than you might think.

One of the players in my game can get his WS just shy of ninety with abilities and equipment, but he gets parried or dodged fairly regularly because if he rolls a 78 that mook with the 35 agility still has a 35% chance of not getting hit. In practical terms what I've discovered about RT player characters about rank 3 and up is that each of them is going to kill about 0.9 mooks every round. So when balancing encounters with mooks don't be afraid to bury them in absurd numbers of mooks.

Also by the time they've reached that point they've transcended your typical rank and file/ganger human punks and mercs anyway so start throwing orks, eldar, your lesser deamons or whatever the hell else at them. Frankly by the time my party hits rank 6 or so the way they're going I might just throw a chaos space marine and a few of his better thralls at them just to see what happens. That might sound harsh but at this point I've pitted them against just about every variation of elite human mook I could think of that I didn't think seemed utterly unfair and they've murdered them all. Only one character has ever died and that was during a duel he accepted from Caligos Winterscale. Worst happened to anyone else is she lost an arm.

Don't be afraid to level up mooks from adventure modules where appropriate, almost all the modules seem to be written for rank 1-2 characters so at the very least raise the number of mooks and give the named adversaries some characteristic advances and equipment upgrades. For instance most NPC RT adversaries as written carry monoswords, but at this point there's no way I'm throwing a named boss at my players that has anything less than a powersword or a bolter.

I don't directly disagree, just be aware that this skews combat into even further advantage towards the skilled combatant, and is deadly punishing to those less-skilled (note, less-skilled, not un-skilled).

If this is what you want, then go ahead. But note that while this might "make sense", it does not make for a "balanced game", and might be terribly un-fun to many classes. Why spend lots of XP on expensive Dodge skill as a non-combat optimised class, when you know the fighters you'll end up trying to evade are going to nix your Dodges anyway?

I would argue the exact opposite of this. I have yet to meet a player who doesn't buy at least +20 to dodge, with elite advances if necessary and why wouldn't they? It's not really expensive XP it's rather cheap to be honest. In fact most of them buy a whole lot more than that.

It's incredibly easy to aquire a dodge skill somewhere in the 70-90ies and absolutely do-able to bring it over a 100.

If you think that it's unfun to be hit by a shot fired by someone with a 70 bs and 4 degrees of success despite your investment of a whole 400 to get to a 40 dodge (assuming +10 dodge and fairly poor agility) then what do you think how fun it is if you threw thousands of experience points out of the window on better melee skills and talents when your are literally unable to even land a single hit because that Harlequin has a clonefield, step aside and well ove a 100 dodge?

The only difference is that you trade deadliness for survivability for skilled combatants, possibly resulting in endless bogged down fighting.

Have you ever seen a fight between a well kitted out mid to high level group of RT characters fighting their equals of eldar? Nobody hits anybody anymore without everybody ganging up on one target. And if you think not being able dodge because your atacker landed too good a shot then how do you feel about not being able to dodge because you are drowning in space clowns? It turns a fight against Harlequins into a circus.

Why I think that's a bad idea: at most in this game you can get 3 dodge attempts (Step Aside and Holofield, the latter which is hard to get and the former which appears only on the list of some careers). Meanwhile almost any class you'd want to melee with has most or all of Swift Attack, Lightning Attack and Two-weapon Wielder talents. IMO melee seems to be balanced with the idea that some attacks will be dodged but you can boost your number of attacks easier than the enemy can boost his number of Dodge reactions.

We have been using DoS in all of my games and it has been working out the best for us.

As Darth Smeg said, "This changes the dynamics on things quite a bit, to the extent where a high-WS fighter will pretty much prevent a regular Joes (not to speak of poor Adepts) from ever managing to avoid a hit." This is absolutely right.

It makes much more sense that the battle hardened veteran who has a multitude of experience fighting melee will succeed compared to the "average joe." Barring a role of a natural 1 (which I always reward), the average Joe with very little combat experience who just happened to pick up a sword should not have nearly as high of a chance when fighting a blademaster with a WS of 65. Sorry, buddy. The future is grim and dark - you should practice with that sword more.

I suppose it depends on your game. I realize a lot of you run with rolled stats and extremely poorly optimized characters, in which case it might be better to give them an actual chance against dangerous opponents. I, on the other hand, play with point buy, and have yet to see a single character with less than 40 starting agility, most with Talented (Dodge) from the get-go. Toward the end, everyone has dodge in the 90-100s, and it pretty much becomes a fact that as long as you have dodges left, you are untouchable. I've considered doing contested checks as well, since it would mean that those of us who started with 60+ BS actually have an advantage against those with 40.

No results to report, though.

Min-Maxers have no place at my table.

We beat them with tube socks filled with oranges until we make orange juice.

Precisely. You might find difficult dodging to cause more problems than it solves.

In my group, on the other hand, anyone who doesn't min-max gets beaten with genestealers until we make genestealer juice, or whatever.