I noticed that, as currently listed on http://rules.l5r.com/Card_types#Personalities, entering play restrictions and requirements must be met both before and after paying the cost of a personality. Am I correct in assuming that a player attempting to purchase a 6 gold cost personality for 4 gold (in clan reduction during dynasty) with a 6 honor requirement would not be able to bring the personality into play and would not have their gold paid 'refunded' if the players honor went below 6 during the process of paying the gold cost? Since the "waive honor requirement" step is before the pay costs step, the player is not able to go back and decide to increase the cost by 2 to ignore honor requirements, correct?
Personalities Entering Play
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.
entering play restrictions and requirements must be met both before and after paying the cost of a personality
Incorrect. When bringing a Personality into play as described in "Card types, Personalities", the Personality’s Honor Requirement and other restrictions on her entering play are only checked once: during step B, before paying costs.
In steps C and D, the condition "if requirements and restrictions are met" means "if requirements and restrictions were met during step B"; accordingly in step D the condition "if costs are met" means "if costs were met during step C". They do not imply requirements and restrictions are checked again at those times, nor that the costs are paid twice; they are reminders of previous operations done in the process of playing a Personality.
Am I correct in assuming that a player attempting to purchase a 6 gold cost personality for 4 gold (in clan reduction during dynasty) with a 6 honor requirement would not be able to bring the personality into play and would not have their gold paid 'refunded' if the players honor went below 6 during the process of paying the gold cost?
No. If you no longer meet Honor Requirements during the process of paying a Personality's costs (e.g. using Shattered Peaks to produce Gold) but all costs are paid, then she enters play regardless, because her Honor Requirement and other restrictions on her entering play have already been successfully checked and these operations are not repeated after costs payment, as explained above.
I noticed that, as currently listed on http://rules.l5r.com/Card_types#Personalities, entering play restrictions and requirements must be met both before and after paying the cost of a personality. Am I correct in assuming that a player attempting to purchase a 6 gold cost personality for 4 gold (in clan reduction during dynasty) with a 6 honor requirement would not be able to bring the personality into play and would not have their gold paid 'refunded' if the players honor went below 6 during the process of paying the gold cost? Since the "waive honor requirement" step is before the pay costs step, the player is not able to go back and decide to increase the cost by 2 to ignore honor requirements, correct?
The reason for the original wording was to make clear that failure to meet a requirement or cost due to interference makes you skip the subsequent steps, except for the last, cleaning up step that eliminates the entering play area.
I've cleaned it up in the CR to more obviously follow the lines of Loïc's explanation.