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, 27 October 2014
So in the comprehensive rules it mentions tokens both as modifiers and bonus & penalties. So I wanted some clarification. Items cannot be negated because they are modifiers. But obviously tokens are not items (or cards for that matter). But there are different types of tokens as well.
Lets say my shugenja has Stones of Purity or The Dragons Tongue attached. Can the force from those token be negated by Breaking the Rhythm?
What if its a Sword token created by a card? Can that be negated as a force bonus?
I tried to find something related on the rules section but couldn't find it. Though I did find an old post that says "The negation of a force bonus is not a penalty." Which makes me want to pull my hair out.
Alex Jones (rules official), 29 October 2014
So in the comprehensive rules it mentions tokens both as modifiers and bonus & penalties. So I wanted some clarification. Items cannot be negated because they are modifiers. But obviously tokens are not items (or cards for that matter). But there are different types of tokens as well.
Lets say my shugenja has Stones of Purity or The Dragons Tongue attached. Can the force from those token be negated by Breaking the Rhythm?
What if its a Sword token created by a card? Can that be negated as a force bonus?
I tried to find something related on the rules section but couldn't find it. Though I did find an old post that says "The negation of a force bonus is not a penalty." Which makes me want to pull my hair out.
Tokens create stat bonuses/penalties like actions and traits, not modifiers like Items, and, according to the Comprehensive Rules: "This bonus or penalty is considered to come from the last effect that placed the token on the card or area."
Thus, Breaking the Rhythm, which negates "current Force bonuses or penalties", will negate the force bonus from the tokens created by Stones of Purity, or The Dragon's Talon.
I'm not sure what you mean by a "Sword token". If you mean a normal token that has the Sword keyword (note that there are no cards that create such tokens), that's just a token. If you mean a "Weapon Item token", which used to be created by some cards, you'll note that there are no longer "Item tokens": all such effects now create Item cards, which are not tokens.
However, the tokens created by, say Singing Blade, Toshigoku's Blade or Developed Quarry are placed on the Item, not on the Personality, and create bonuses to the Item's force modifier, and so will be unaffected by Breaking the Rhythm.