What is the range of number of dice thrown?

Is there an important method for resolving who wins on two zero-sum rolls?

What is the name of the game, or is it not a published rpg? (This would be useful to let others with the same problem find this question.)

I don't understand the "minimum score of 0 for any roll."

@Novak Probably negative dice sums are treated as 0... ([-1] + [1] + [0] + [-1] = 0)

Yes, but I don't understand the significance when you're just trying to figure out who rolled higher. The numbers could just as easily (and more straightforwardly) be 1, 2, 2, 3, 3, 4.

@Novak the margin of victory matters. For example, whether your -1 roll counts as a 0 matters when you compare it with the opponent's roll of 2. In one case the margin is 3 and in the other it is 2.

@ruse Maybe. I would like to hear from the original poster, along with what game this is, because I suspect this is going to be one weird and non-intuitive system.

@Novak Ruse is correct about the zero mattering because of margin of victory. The game is one of my own design, so not published yet. I play it with my young children, who can count, but can't do negative numbers or dice manipulation yet. I want to make the system playable with regular dice (because friends expressed interest in trying it and don't have the special dice), without messing with the mechanics. Wasn't sure if that detail would be important to the question. There's nothing weird about the system.

@Someone_Evil the number of dice thrown is usually between 2 and 6.

@Erik If your children can't do negative numbers then maybe having a -1 on the dice is not the best choice xD

@Ruse it seems to work just fine for them. The youngest understands the X means you remove one success symbol :) But the idea of going below zero doesn't make sense to them. The dice don't have actual numbers but symbols; I used them because it lets them count symbols instead of having to add.

@Erik so what you mean is, "Grab a pile of N of these weird dice, sum with negative numbers, and if the whole total is less than zero, replace the whole total with zero?" I seem to be the only person misunderstanding that-- I think for some reason I couldn't tell if a "roll" was a pile of dice, or an individual die in the pile.

@Erik and by 'weird and non-intuitive', I mean producing a multi-modal probability distribution, which this one will-- there will be an extra peak at zero for at least some value N of dice.

Interestingly, this is equivalent to an "averaging" die minus 3. While not an answer because it probably still involves buying more dice, and while averaging dice aren't as easy to find as regular d6s, they're probably easier to find than the dice in the question.

Not adding as an answer, because you want to use regular dice, but blank dice are fairly easy to find online and not too expensive. One blank dice + a sharpie = any dice you want.