Bonuses and Penalties:
Striking:
For striking, the person has +3 for aimed shots and +1 for most bursts. The individual also gets an addition +1 for every three levels above first. These bonuses are added to the shooters physical prowess bonuses, if any. This is then the shooters bonuses to strike.
Some shooters are better than others, in Palladium this is mostly represented by physical prowess. Physical Prowess is suppose to include hand and eye coordination as well as general manual dexterity among other physical qualities. This is much of what determines the ability of a person to hit a target quickly. In most non Palladium game system, the equivalent of Physical Prowess gives bonuses to strike.

Dodging:
In dodging shots from arrows, firearm, and energy weapons the target gets full hand to hand bonuses to dodge. This is to better represent the ability of a person to be able to dodge fire aimed at the individual and allows for decent chances to dodge bullets being fired at them.
In Heroes Unlimited Second Edition and Mystic Russia for Rifts they state that a attempting to dodge a bullet has severe penalties (-8) with no prowess bonuses to dodge. This creates a situation which characters might as well just stand in a line and shoot at each other. This is a situation that the author strongly disagrees with.
The Author has fired a pistol a huge number of times and is pretty good at hitting a paper target that is not dodging. The problem is that when a person is moving around a lot, they are hard targets to hit. Law Enforcement reports give ranges from 5 rounds per hit to 10 rounds per hit. This gets even worse in military reports. Reports from Vietnam state that is was 250,000 bullet per kill. This is partially due to that fact that sprays are not as effective as many people believe and that single shots are actually more effective. In wars that burst firing in combat was less often and in Korea, World War 2, and World War 1 the kills ratio was in the range of hundreds to thousand of rounds per kill.
This is also a simple problem with regards to game balance. Game combats will quickly evolve into who has the greatest ability to withstand damage and what weapon inflicts the most damage and this is not the type of game that the Author wishes to play. As well, most other game systems that have firearms in them have their equivalent of Physical Prowess give bonuses to dodge being shot at by those weapons.
It is assumed that this is partially from the fact that a person being aimed at will be constantly moving around or ducking behind cover It is also partially because while you cannot dodge the bullet, you can dodge where the barrel is being pointed at.

By Mischa and Kitsune.