What checks are there for these skills? I don't think parry or dodge. Things like evade and evasion perhaps? Or is it a check against parry, dodge and shield block as well? Curious from logs I have been seeing.

Parry, dodge and shield block basically work against normal passive melee hits only. Evade helps against active skills (like dagger spec moves), which (besides the obvious skill % and RNG) may each also have checks specific to that skill, such as your dex or any number of other factors (stats/properties) of the characters in question.

What Calion said is pretty accurate. In a general sense...

Generally dodge, parry, shield block, spin, distance only work
against "automatic" things like regular hits, etc.

Against "active" skills like impale, kick, hamstring, whatever else,
evade is the skill that you would look for. A few things will change
this - PARRY ANYTHING is a warrior edge that more or less gives an
ability to parry skills you could otherwise evade.

It's also possible that an individual skill is coded such that a
defense COULD help against it. The only one I can think of like this
off the top of my head is flurry, in which you can see echoes where
your standard d/p/sb gives a damage reduction.