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.
A player, 19 May 2014
Cards involved: Planted Evidence/Sinister Citadel of Spider/Aranai Sensei
I know you typically don't answer questions about upcoming cards, but I'm asking more about the existing card with a particular situation.
Planted Evidence (and similar cards) causes you to lose honor equal to your starting family honor. As a player using "The Sinister Citadel of the Spider" you have a starting honor of 0, so you're going to lose nothing, obviously.
With Aranai Sensei, we see the easiest way for those spiders to go below that 0. (with older cards, if you want to not answer about TCS cards before they're released, we can replace the Spider stronghold with the Forgotten Temple)
I *assume* that 0 is a hard cap, if your starting family honor is below 0, then you do not lose OR GAIN anything. (we're not going mathematically here, where subtracting a negative ends up being adding a positive.)
I know, it's an easy answer, just wanted to make sure about it, because I've run into the players who do wonky stuff such as this.
Alex Jones (rules official), 21 May 2014
Cards involved: Planted Evidence/Sinister Citadel of Spider/Aranai Sensei
I know you typically don't answer questions about upcoming cards, but I'm asking more about the existing card with a particular situation.
Planted Evidence (and similar cards) causes you to lose honor equal to your starting family honor. As a player using "The Sinister Citadel of the Spider" you have a starting honor of 0, so you're going to lose nothing, obviously.
With Aranai Sensei, we see the easiest way for those spiders to go below that 0. (with older cards, if you want to not answer about TCS cards before they're released, we can replace the Spider stronghold with the Forgotten Temple)
I *assume* that 0 is a hard cap, if your starting family honor is below 0, then you do not lose OR GAIN anything. (we're not going mathematically here, where subtracting a negative ends up being adding a positive.)
I know, it's an easy answer, just wanted to make sure about it, because I've run into the players who do wonky stuff such as this.
Playing Planted Evidence with a negative starting family honour does not result in an honour gain.
A player, 3 June 2014
As a follow-up to this post.
Am I correct to assume that it is page 5 of the comprehensive rules that stops an honour loss becoming an honour gain ("the minimum value of a gain or loss is zero"), as opposed to the rules on pages 12 and 13?