We’ve had a lot of rules that read like “As a weekly action, any Player may decrease every Player’s A by X.” which would no longer work with this solution. Also, we occasionally have similar actions that occur automatically.

I’m not quite sure how best to solve this. Maybe we could just add explicit restrictions to spending and transferring game variables, which seem to be the only real offenders here. Actually, upon closer inspection, transferring seems to work as intended in a roundabout way (since it uses the before-after difference instead of the ‘spent’ amount), but it couldn’t hurt to impose a more robust restriction there as well.

The problem is that we can’t have a catch-all wording that allows some actions to go below zero, auto-correct and still be legal, while causing other actions to go below zero, be illegal and get reversed.

Meaning that one case or the other will always have to be explicitly allowed by exception in the rules. And that exception will sometimes be forgotten, causing unfortunate consequences.

If the ruleset implicitly disallows results that go below zero, and forces players to add caveats to rules where those results are a desirable byproduct (as in the proposed fix), then the absence of those caveats in rules will lead to, at worst, occasional illegal actions and fix proposals.

If, however, the ruleset implicitly allows results that go below zero, but forces players to caveat proposals where that is an undesirable outcome, then the absence of those caveats lead to scams.

I think, in this instance, the ruleset should take the more conservative road.

I prefer Josh’s wording to Purplebeard’s, here, by quite a way.

Josh’s reasoning makes sense.

Why not just set it to zero if it starts higher than 0, but it’s illegal if it starts at 0?

@Chivalrybean - wouldn’t have prevented this scam, for instance, as the rule allowed PB to spend any amount of Baabucks to conduct any amount of transfers - meaning that he could legally batch them as one transaction.

CoV

Also: baa.