minimal damage by weapons and spells

[Steve Plambeck]

If you have or are designing a low damage weapon or a creature with a low damage bite or claw, I can see the advantage to keeping damage rolls with a minus-something in them to have fine control of that damage.

For example, a nuisance creature that does an average of 1 hit damage, but you don't want it to always be only 1, you want some variability. To get that you set the damage as 1-1. The six possible rolls adjusted for the -1 become: 0, 0, 0, 1, 2, 3, which results in that average result being 1 hit while permitting it to go as high as 3 hits on a small number of occasions.

So a blanket rule to ignore all results of 0 in all damage rolls takes away that level of fine-tuned control, and I don't think I'd favor that. TBH, some of the stated damages for some of the melee hand weapons in the official Weapons Table could do with a bit of a tweak on a case by case basis. The Bastard Sword example Drakenbow gives is a fine case in point. Rather than changing game rules though, I'd just change the particular weapon's damage where needed. The Bastard Sword damage could change from 2+1/3-2 to being 2+1/2+2 or even 2+1/2+3 just to make the two-handed damage never worse than the one-handed damage.