Here is some changes to the dodge rules that I have made to try and make combat a bit more fluid. We have only had limited testing so I'm not sure how well they work out in gameplay but the idea is to have it so people can't just dodge gunfire standing out in the open and continue on. They either run for cover or they hit the deck. Coupled with this is a change to the blast rule where weapon damage drops off with range which allows people to dodge blast weapons even if they cant get completely out of their range, to compensate I also increase blast weapons damage by 2. Let me know what you think. (sections in bold are changes)

Dodge (Agility)

Dodge is the ability to avoid blows in melee, duck incoming fire or leap out of the way of falling debris. It combines nimbleness of movement with trained reflexes and an awareness of all kinds of danger. A character can use his Dodge Skill to dodge either melee attacks or ranged attacks. Dodging attacks is a made in response to a foe’s successful attack. If dodging a ranged attack the character must do one of 2 things. If he is within his agility bonus meters of cover that he can hide behind he may move into that cover, if he is not he must go prone but can move up to half his Ag bonus in meters. If the character is already prone he must move at least 1 m and can move up to half his Ag Bonus in meters. A success indicates that the attack has been avoided and it does not hit the character. In the case of attacks which cause multiple hits (such as automatic fire) each Degree of Success a character achieves on his Dodge Test discounts one hit from the attack. Any excess hits not discounted by dodging are then applied to the character as normal.

The GM may call on a player to use the Dodge Skill when:

• They are attacked in melee.

• They are attacked with a ranged weapon.

• They need to avoid hazards such as falling wreckage or leap from a collapsing bridge.

Dodge Modifiers

+10 - You are on higher level than your opponent (At least a meter, the GM may determine that this must be more depending on the circumstance)

-10 - Your opponent is on higher level.

-20 - Character is in a tunnel, corridor or other confined space where there is not a lot of room to manoeuvre.

Blast (X)

Many missiles, grenades, and some guns create an explosion when they hit their target. When working out a hit from a Blast weapon, anyone within the weapon’s blast radius in metres, indicated by the number in parentheses, is also hit. Blast weapon damage reduces the further away from the blast that you are, each full meter from the blast reduces the targets damage by 2 so a person standing 3m away would reduce their damage by 6. Roll Damage separately for each person affected by the blast.

Evading Auto-Fire, Multiple Attacks and Area Effect Attacks

Some attacks—such as those made with grenades, flamers, or guns firing semi-automatic or fully-automatic bursts—are especially difficult to avoid. When Dodging an area effect weapon (such as a weapon with the Blast or Spray Qualities), a successful Dodge Test moves the character away from the center of the blast up to his Ag bonus in meters . If the character is unable to be moved out of the way due to an obstruction of some sort (such as when they are within the confines of a tight corridor), then the Dodge Test automatically fails. When Evading Swift Attacks, Lightning Attacks, Full Auto Bursts, Semi-Auto Bursts, or any weapon with the Twin-Linked Quality, each Degree of Success on the Dodge Test negates one additional hit. When Evading weapons with the Storm Quality, each Degree of Success on the Dodge Test negates two hits.

If dodging a ranged attack the character must do one of 2 things. If he is within his agility bonus meters of cover that he can hide behind he may move into that cover, if he is not he must go prone but can move up to half his Ag bonus in meters. If the character is already prone he must move at least 1 m and can move up to half his Ag Bonus in meters

The Prone alternative doesn't make any sense to me. Going prone without being in cover is tantomount to suicide. Intrinsically, on it's own, the act of going prone isn't going to be a viable 'dodge' method. Not sure what to offer at this moment, but I don't like this bit.

Dodging into cover is already a thing, yeah? Although it's not so much "dodging" as "taking reduced damage and going Prone". By RAW, Prone does help against non-Point Blank ranged attacks, but I don't think Prone is something characters should opt into. Without [Leap Up], standing up from a Prone position is a Half Action, and even then standing up can only be attempted on the character's Turn. If you're going for a Dodge roll/somersault-type deal it's a good effort, but I don't think it'll work out the way you currently have it. I'm going with [Cogniczar] on this one.

About the Blast damage falloff, I don't think it's a necessary change. In fact, doesn't it hurt grenades? Grenades aren't nearly as available as simple bullets are and grenade whiffs are much more pronounced. Changing the main reason behind grenades, their Blast quality, drives another nail in their coffin. Like, why use a grenade when a Full Auto or Spray weapon does the job roughly the same job for cheaper? This point is more bashing the theory behind grenades rather than your particular house rule though. Consumables are difficult to implement since they need to be useful enough to overcome their very limited number of uses. Even the most common grenades are arguably not worth it.

So yeah I should probably have explained my reason behind each change. The changes to dodge were to stop players just standing out in the open and relying on a combination of dodge and fate point re-rolls to keep them out of danger. A prime example was when a player ran up to in front of a heavy stubber and just rolled dodge to mean he wouldn't take any damage. It was just strange and immersion breaking that he could just basically stand there and do nothing (since he didn't move) while this heavy machine gun blasted away at him.

My original change meant that you had to head for cover but I got complaints from my players that this was too restrictive for dodge so I added in the ability to throw yourself to the ground to try and avoid incoming shots. The new rule makes it much better to stick close to cover but doesn't leave a player completely high and dry if they are caught in the open. If caught in the open they can hit the dirt (which is intentionally a negative of being caught in the open) making them harder to hit but also nerfing the second dodge if they have step aside. At that point it would be down to the players teammates to suppress their opponents to try and get them out of that situation or kill the ones that theaten anyone caught in the open. In my opinion (feel free to disagree) it opens up a range of new choices and dynamics in ranged firefights where you can effectively suppress/pin down and eliminate enemy forces that get themselves out of position while making cover a much more mandatory consideration for players thinking about survival.

So yeah prone isn't something you opt into really its the negative for being to far from cover to get there.

On the grenades thing I did mention that I upped blast weapon damage by 2. This means that a direct hit does more damage than previously but someone just caught in the blast of one will be less likely to be killed. If I'm honest here this one is more a result of Only War than Dark Heresy where the Blast Quality got up to 15. The idea is to make it so that there is a more interesting dynamic than just is your AG bonus high enough. It also means that every time you get hit by a blast weapon you have to make a choice on whether to dodge it or not since even if you can't escape all the damage the chance of a reduction by 6 for even a relativity low AG bonus character is often worth taking the risk. In terms of Frag grenades its rarely a factor since most characters have the required AG bonus of 3 to dodge them anyway. What it really now turns blast weapons into is dodge soaking weapons which strip dodge attempts from the target in order to ensure that the bigger more dangerous weapons go through. In Dark Heresy it pretty much only affects the Frag Missile since most of the time since there are few opponents with a AG bonus of 2 that also have the ability to dodge worth a ****. It actually makes the Frag Missile a great opener for players as it will likely take up a whole bunch of dodges from targets with only one shot and the increased damage means that if it does hit its intended target its going to do more to him.

So yeah, that's my thinking on why I have made those changes. As a group we extensively modded our game which includes often increased weapon damages and a more dangerous wound system and I don't expect most people to agree with our system changes but they work for us. I just like to put my changes out and see what other people say.

I've done some more thinking on these changes.

DODGE

Keeping in mind that a [Round] is roughly 5 to 6 seconds long, I find it hard to believe that a character could consistently flit around AgB meters every time she Dodges. This includes the RAW method of Evading Area-of-Effect attacks. Considering that a successful [standing Horizontal Jump] only moves a character {SB + (DoS x 0.5)m} as a Full Action, 5 or 6 seconds, there should be no reason for a character to suddenly jerk 6 meters away in a fraction of a second, especially more than once. So, I agree with you that Dodge changes are in order, but I would probably make even more drastic changes. Like, a character could only [Dive for Cover] or evade [blast] weapons within AgB/2 or even AgB/3 meters as a baseline. Although, even though this would be more "realistic", combat becomes even more lethal than it already is. May or may not be a good thing, but it increases the value of Cover and Blast weapons at least.

BLAST

Changing my stance from before, the Blast Damage decay isn't as bad as I initially thought. Again, taking up the "realism" angle, a grenade or what have you should have increased damage closer to the explosion. I would combine it with my Dodge changes above, in addition to allowing a character to spend a Reaction to move as far from the Blast as she can. I would want people to try Dodging a grenade to the best of their ability, even if they can't escape the Blast radius completely. If that's only 1 meter so be it, but that's already better than taking the explosion point blank.

Here is some changes to the dodge rules that I have made to try and make combat a bit more fluid .

[bolding is mine]

So what do you mean by more fluid? A lot of these are adding extra math, extra rules on positioning (are you using a grid? is it using 1 meter squares?), and making things much more difficult for the person trying to dodge. This seems like it's going to weigh combat down a lot more than make it more fluid. In addition, it's also screwing up the fact that many characters are only going to have 1 chance to dodge per round. Back in the beta, people proposed having dodge be an opposed check, but it was pointed out that the attacker has far more ways to enhance his attack skill than the dodger has to enhance his dodge check, so it makes more sense to keep it as an all-or-nothing check. Your proposed rules are causing a similar problem where the attacker is strongly getting the advantage, and you're also basically requiring more time to be spent on dodging and rolling around on the ground than the actual combat.

Honestly, I'd suggest if you want to make combat run more fluidly, you should just disallow characters from dodging gunfire when they're out in the open and create a talent they can buy that allows them to dodge gunfire out in the open. It keeps things more realistic, if that's what you're going for. Keep in mind that 40K is kind of meant to encourage melee combat and the like, so charging against someone is encouraged by the rules for a reason.

As for the rules on reduced damage for blast radii, I'd suggest you leave that alone as well. Explosives are already pretty weak in the rules, and having them be all-or-nothing is an important part of keeping them up to par with automatic weapons. Again, if you want more fluidity in combat, you don't want to bog it down with a bunch of extra rules, rolls, or math. If you want a tactical feel for combat, ask yourself whether a rule is giving a player more tactics to choose from, or whether it is just restricting him or her further. The RAW already have a dearth of actual combat tactics (most of the tactics are from what talents and equipment you choose, followed by just spamming the same attack over and over in actual combat), so the more restrictions you add, the more you shrink down options for players.

Yeah I don't know why I said that to be honest, typing without thinking really. It forces a bit more movement from what I've played with it as players have to move out from behind cover. I personally don't think the prone thing is too big a deal. You can still fire from prone at no penalty and incoming fire becomes harder to hit so it's not the worst thing in the world to happen to you. The issue is that it pins you down and makes leap up an important talent for melee fighters who rely on dodging. I don't see it as overly hurting the defenders because the 2 options are prone for -20 to hit on subsequent shots and or to go into full cover which is obviously a huge benefit. If leap up was really hard to get then maybe I'd see the prone as a huge downside but it's only tier 1 with an easy prerequisite and a general aptitude.

I do think I need to reword something though since the dodge attempt is meant to happen before the prone penalty kicks in. The prone penalty would only apply to the second dodge not the first.

On explosives. I think this is one case where my other house rules which make damage much more dangerous to take that make this one work. We use a system we call quick death where damage sustained past TB causes critical results. This means, that someone with T3 and 2 AP who takes a 11 damage hit would take a critical result of 3 to that location (there is a bit more to it than that but that's the basics of how it works). Since we have this I also use the old version of RF so 10's do extra damage instead of crits. Because of those factors explosives are way more dangerous in my game than they would be in most other people's.

Dodge has always been a tricky thing, in my opinion, the rules make it sound as though any attack can be dodged and even though the rule is a double edged sword, I feel battles are severely slowed down if I ran it by the book's rules, so I have altered it quite a bit for my games.

Given I use Roll20.net for my games, I usually have tokens and maps for my players so they can see what happens around them.

There needs to be a 90 degrees visual of who and what attacks the person, so attacks from the sides and back cannot be dodged. Sniper attacks and surprise/ambushes cannot be dodged as they were not anticipated.

I should probably state I haven't had many issues with dodge, and if any of my PCs has been unhappy with the ruling, we've usually talked it through.

Just as a point the Evade rule says that the target must be aware of the attack and not be Surprised so thats not really an issue in my eyes.

I cant believe nobody made the reference yet to call of duty. Everyone goes prone when they get shot at or at least they used to for the same exact reason. Its harder to hit them while giving no negative to you besides you cant move. Think of real world tactics. When solders get shot at what do they do? Go prone or find the nearest cover. Also in a matter of 6 seconds alot of things can happen. Depending on how fast you are you can move quite a bit in 6 seconds. Personally I had the same issue with doge. I had players that were literally just dodging and didnt even want to move forward just to prove how broken the system was. (in only war) and so I just house ruled it like this

I changed it to Doge in cover Talent

• When you want to dodge enemy fire you must either go prone or doge to the nearest cover based on your agility bonus in meters as half action.
• You cannot return fire if the enemy is using semi or auto fire

This just simplifies things and I think ,my players liked it as it gave them an opportunity to fire back without being 100% broken. This represents those shootouts where you see in the movies as everyone going into cover and giving return fire as soon as they do it. This also makes combat move abit faster as they players have a change to shoot back at the enemy on his turn.