I don’t care enough to care about this.

Maybe we just need “zero is considered to be a positive number” in the appendix, if this is how most people are playing it.

I suspect that would break just as much in the other direction. People tend to use it inconsistently, or just not to think about it.

Maybe we just need “all numbers are equivalent to a suffusion of yellow” in the appendix.

Yup, I’m with ais523. There’s no need to make the problem worse. Just fix it and hopefully everyone will remember for next time.

Please see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_number

It’s an interesting one. In actual fact, 0 can be both positive and negative as ‘+0’ isn’t nonsense, just uninteresting. Equally, 0 can be a negative number. The only consequence of this is that we have a precedent of being able to use a number which *could* be negative. However, since the rule states that it ‘must be a positive integer’, this is not a possibility in this case.

However, the ‘defaulting to 0’ bit is unnecessary, since rule 3.3.1 states:

“If a game variable has no defined starting value for new Artists, or for existing Artists upon the variable’s creation, then that starting value is zero (for numerical variables)”

Prince Anduril: from your linked article: “A real number is said to be positive if it is greater than zero, and negative if it is less than zero.” The fact that -0, 0, and +0 are all the same number doesn’t mean that zero is ever positive.

I suspect that in every case we should just use “natural number” instead of “positive integer” or “nonnegative integer”; at least it’s *definitively* ambiguous :)

Wooble. But we are talking about integers, not real numbers. They are very different things.

To the best of my knowledge, the number 0 has no sign (and therefore is neither positive nor negative), even though it might be useful to treat it as if it did for certain applications.

Anyway, the Appendix specifies that the default form for variables is to use nonnegative integers with 0 for the starting value. There’s no reason to state this explicitly in a dynastic rule.

By the way, this right-brain dynasty should totally allow Artists to have irrational or imaginary Acclaim.

Hey, can I arrow Purplebeard’s comment? No? Aww…

Prince Anduril: the integers are a subset of the real numbers.