Active Defenses

The current system of resolving active defenses has one major dwarback from my point of view, where I want to use the margin of success of an attack roll to determine effects. Namely, if you almost dodged, shouldn't that be as good as the other guy almost missing? To correct for this, I came up with the following:

All active defenses (dodge, block, parry) are treated as a contest of skills instead of an all-or-nothing roll. The attacker must succeed his weapon skill check in order to hit, but he must also succeed by as much or more than his opponent succeeds his defense roll. The active defenses are as follows:

Dodge is a contest of 2 × the defender's Basic Speed vs. the attacker's weapon skill
Parry is a contest of weapon skill vs. weapon skill.
Block is a contest of the defender's shield skill vs. the attacker's weapon skill.

There is no longer any deceptive attack maneuver, it is already included in the active defense as contest rule. This also makes the feint maneuver rather pointless, although you can try it if you want to.

All normal modifiers to active defenses apply, except that all modifiers to defense that are bought with character points are doubled! This includes Combat Reflexes (+2 to all active defenses), Enhanced Black (+2 to block per level), Enhanced Parry (+2 to parry per level), and Enhanced Dodge (+2 to dodge per level).

All parries and blocks against swung attacks of reach 1 or greater are at +1.

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