One of my players asked this and I'm not sure what to tell him:

Say you had two swords - could you parry with both in the same round? Not as two reactions, but stack the 'Balanced' quality for a +20?

If you have Two-Weapon Wielder (Melee) could you do it?

From a 'makes sense' perspective I'd say yes - we've seen enough movies where someone uses two swords to block someone's attack - but I'm not sure if the rules handle this particular situation at all.

Thanks!

BYE

Well, you could flavour-wise. But the effect would be the same as a normal parry action.

If he wants a mechanical effect, that sounds like a reasonable 200-300 xp elite advance talent. Although that sort of fancy-pants manouver is also abstracted into things like the Defensive Stance action and the Combat Master and Wall of Steel talents to a degree.

(there are also weapons with the Defensive quality which are decent for attacking in the IH, and weapons with a greater-than-balanced parry bonus in the RH core book).

As an additional and slightly related question.

Dual Shot - what if one of the weapons has the Accurate Quality?

I'd follow the precedent of the Red-Dot sight mentioned in the talent description and let the player get the benefit to BS from Accurate from one of his weapons, but not stack the effects together if he has two.

If the other weapon actually has the Inaccurate trait, a strict reading of the rules seems to be that the player would get no bonus from aiming at all. An alternative would be to let the two traits cancel each other out instead (allowing Aiming but no bonus).

Note that since Dual Shot uses a Full Action, the player would need to Aim the turn before and not take any further actions (including Reactions) betwen aiming and making the shot, as usual.

(It occurs to me that Reliable and Best-Quality are similar. A prevented Jam is still a miss, so I guess one gun would jam and the other wouldn't on a roll that could jam. No idea what to do if one is Unreliable and the other isn't, maybe just treat it as a normal shot with the other gun while the Unreliable one jams Although you'd need a rather good combination of BS and bonuses to still hit on a roll that high anyhow.)

Absolutely no stacking of "balanced" on two different weapons to parry an attack at +20%. Now can someone with two different melee weapons equipped and the Wall of Steel talent could (if they wanted to for some reason) use a different weapon to parry on their two reactions. Perhaps they have a weapon with "defensive" in one hand and a powersword in the other... Normally you would want to parry with the weapon that has the Defensive trait since it grants a +15% parry bonus, but your foe is swinging a poweraxe at you and you decide that clanging a steel weapon against a power field a few times seems like a bad idea and toss your sword up in the way instead. Meanwhile the axe weilding loony's henchman takes a poke at you with a monospear... time to swing your unpowered defensive weapon up to block.

So can you parry with two weapons if you have the correct talents? Yes. Can you stack the bonuses? Only if the same player lets you stack the +20% autofire bonus against them PER SHELL the next time you point a heavy bolter at them.

Yes, you can parry their bad idea with a bad idea of your own. =P Works surprisingly well. A GM friend of mine once had a player in a GURPS Space game ask him if their character (in a game where the players were more or less X-Files in space, not a bunch of marines) could have a overcharged gatling anti-dino x-ray laser. He looked the player in the eye, put on his best wicked grin and asked the player "Do you want to NEED that gun?" At that point the other players settled the issue without the GM having to have a "hell NO!" tirade.

H.B.M.C. said:

You could split the BS difference. IE The previous round you used a half aim with your pistols (BS 34). One pistol is accurate the other is not (One gets +10 the other +20). On this round you use Dual Shot the BS would be 49 total ( (44+54)/2 ).

Another possibility is to take into account both different BS totals. IE The previous round you used a half aim with your pistols (BS 34). One pistol is accurate the other is not (One gets +10 the other +20). So now one pistol hits on a roll of 44 or less while the other hits on a roll of 54 or less. On the round you use Dual Shot say you roll a 35. Your Dual Shot succeeds. Now say you roll a 45. This means that your dual shot fails but you still managed to hit with one of your pistols.

EDIT: Ack! I guess I just restated pretty much what HodgePodge said already. Reading Comprehension FTW.