Is it possible to deal 0 damage against a target with Armor?

[zarthas]

I did notice the line about a weapon's damage roll having a minimum result of 1, which is awesome.  I saw on the TFT forums that an officially supported RAW interpretation is that a dagger can do 0 damage 1/3 of the time to a completely unarmored target and such a goofy design choice made me drop that game entirely. (This may not be the case in the Legacy edition, this argument was from a few years back).
So thank you for being sane!

My next question is that it is not entirely clear to me based on the rules that I should or should not be doing 0 damage with a dagger against Plate Armor (5).

I have been playing it this way, but the discussion around a successful attack doing 0 damage to unarmored targets has made me question reality.

[mister frau blucher]

Maybe we need a clarification in the rules. Yeah, a weapon will always do 1 point of damage, minimum. So an unarmored dude will always take at least a point from a strike.

But that is only against unarmored foes. There is no guaranteed damage against a guy in any kind of armor. Even cloth will stop that 1 guaranteed, should you be unlucky enough to roll it.

[zarthas]

Jul 29, 2021 17:55:25 GMT -5 mister frau blucher said:

Maybe we need a clarification in the rules. Yeah, a weapon will always do 1 point of damage, minimum. So an unarmored dude will always take at least a point from a strike.

But that is only against unarmored foes. There is no guaranteed damage against a guy in any kind of armor. Even cloth will stop that 1 guaranteed, should you be unlucky enough to roll it.

That is the way it read to me, guaranteed 1 damage before applying damage reduction.  I think that is pretty intuitive, I never would have thought differently if I did not learn people were playing that other fantasy adventure game with 0 damage rolls against unarmored foes for like 40 years...

Thanks for clarifying though!

[nils]

We always interpreted the 0 damage in TFT as a scratch. Not enough to cause 10% life loss on a normal ST10 person, but enough to draw blood or cause bruising.