Dodge is the body simply not being where the weapon arrives — a drop of the shoulder, a step off the line, a lean that costs nothing but the moment it took. It is a subskill of Melee, carrying its own Skill Base but developing at Melee’s Skill Multiple, because it is learned in the same place and at the same time as everything else about fighting.
Blocking and counterstriking already involve a great deal of footwork; those defences test Melee itself. Dodge is the more radical thing — total evasion, no contact at all — and at close quarters that is hard. The difficulty is expressed in the tiebreak: a dodging defender must win the exchange outright to avoid the blow, where a blocker need only tie.
Evading missiles. A character deliberately evading imposes a penalty on missile attackers equal to five times their Effective Dodge Index — the Index taken from a Dodge Mastery Level already reduced by fatigue, impairment and encumbrance. A heavily laden, badly winded character is not evading anything.
Twice a character’s Acrobatics Index applies as a bonus to Dodge tests, and improves the evasion penalty besides.