With regards to my question, I was asking if producing gold for a variable cost action is equivalent to paying the gold. If so, then whatever you produced is paid to Deliberations and not pooled. So, can I produce X gold, and then only pay Y of it for the action? This only happens to be relevant to variable cost actions such as Unsettling Gathering (and similar) where it says you can transfer an attachment "equal to or lower than the amount paid."
Re: Variable cost actions and gold pooling
A topic from AEG's L5R CCG Rules forum, copied for Oracle of the Void from a copy of the forum saved in October 2015, so pages it didn't save are missing. Players' names are left out; the rules officials are named. Rulings are as they stood on these dates; later rulings, the rulebooks and the Rules Archive may differ.
Yes, you decide how much of the gold produced will actually be "spent" or "paid" on the action, and then the rest will be pooled. You just have to declare how much gold are you paying when paying the action's costs, and how much gold remains unspent.