Damage Rolls with a Minus Modifier: Minimum 0 or 1?

[Rick_Smith]

Originally Posted by JLV

... the idea behind Rick's Weapons table (and this assumes here that I understood his original explanation of it), is because the ONLY thing it changes is the nature of the damage inflicted by the various weapons, and it does so by changing the number of potential damage points inflicted by a given weapon. ...

Hi JLV,
Yes you are correct. Steve Jackson wrote long ago that a rapier could do more damage than a broad sword, but he was going to ignore that and keep TFT simple. But WHY could a rapier do more damage? Well if it pierced a vital organ or major artery you would die fast. Of course most pokes would not hit anything critical and the small hole does less tissue trauma than a large cut.

I decided that 'piercing' weapons tended to do either a lot or a little damage.

So I went thru my weapon table and made piercing weapons do damage like 3d-6. So the range of possible damage goes up a lot. Quite often they do little or no damage, but once in a while they do a LOT of damage.

Where as blunt impact weapons and cutting weapons do damage like 1d+3. Much more predictable.

I like this. NO new rules at all. But the weapon table has more variety and some weapons are more 'swingy' than others.

***
Post Script.

JLV, if you wanted to look at my weapon's list for your own interest, rather than suggesting I submit it to the forum for consideration, you can find it here on the Brainiac site.

https://tft.brainiac.com/RicksTFT/We...loadableFiles/

(Since that was posted, I've revised the table again. More daggers, and I've beefed up pole weapons a bit. Gunpowder weapons have been moved into a 12 page supplement. I need to put the updated rules on the page some time.)

Warm regards, Rick