Quote:
Originally Posted by flankspeed
Personally, I don't like penalizing weapons such as the dagger or cutlass to do zero damage, so I typically see the minimum damage as being one point no matter what the minus is. I mean, if the cutlass can occasionally strike with the flat of the blade to do no effective damage, so could any other sword.
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I don't see having a weapon being able to roll zero damage as unduly penalizing a light weapon, as I think it is important to be able to distinguish not-very-damaging effects, and I don't see zero damage as necessarily meaning you weren't cut at all - it might just be a superficial cut that doesn't amount to a whole point of damage (which after all is about 10% of the way to unconsciousness or death for most people).
Also there would be a major balance shift for all the existing minor 1d-X damage effects, and a major added effect/incentive to wear Cloth or take Toughness to stop all the min-1 damage results (not that that part of it wouldn't make sense - it does work well in GURPS where it's part of the design, but the TFT damage values weren't written with min 1 in mind).
However I do agree that "all weapons should be capable of an ineffective hit" is a good point. In particular I don't tend to like to have a high minimum damage (like you get with magic or fine weapons unless you convert some of the + amount to dice). When I have made various house-rules to account for such, they have added such a chance of zero damage to more powerful weapons (e.g. add 1d-4 or 2d-7 to every weapon damage), instead of removing that chance from less powerful weapons. It's also perhaps easier and more appropriate to put such a chance in the to-hit roll, and/or deem that it's already in the to-hit roll.