Negative Values

This isn't really a question so much as a humble request for official thumbs up.

There was a question posted on JOL recently about Condemnation: Mute on a primogen and the mechanic of negative votes. I've seen this question come up a few times, and the answer is straightforward. There is a fundamental property of the game that values can go negative. You can have negative stealth, negative intercept, negative hand strength, negative bleed, and of course negative votes.

In the process of answering the question, I went looking for some concise official statement about negative values, and I couldn't find one anywhere. As far as I can tell, the word "negative" only appears in the card rulings list once, in the context of Life Boon.

@Ankha if I may be so bold as to @ you on here, would you be willing to give me a "Correct" response on my statement above, or if I've said anything wrong, a clarifying comment, so we can link to this when answering the question? I realize most experienced VTES players don't have a problem with this concept, but I find it is not intuitive for new players (who are probably bringing context from other games which might not do this), and it would be extremely helpful to have this be discoverable from rulings at least. In the end I'd love to submit a ruling request on Condemnation: Mute specifically linking to this post, but I think it could be applied in a few other places where players have been confused in the past.

Many thanks!

> or a negative number of vampires

Wouldn't negative vampires just be imbued? ;-P

Kidding of course, thanks for the confirmation!

Sorry, hate to resurrect an idle thread, but there's some deliberation about this on discord and it sounds like we're still missing an authoritative answer on whether titles can be worth negative votes. This would be relevant for the various Fee Stake cards, which explicitly say non Anarch *titles* are worth -1 votes. The natural question is can this number go negative? I'll admit based on the fact that vampires can have negative votes, I would assume a title can "grant" negative too, but it sounds like there was an old post where someone asserted that titles can't go negative and LSJ didn't explicitly object.

I'm not sure what the right answer is here, is it indeed that titles can bottom out at 0?

[quote="jonrreeves post=115955 userid=383984" but it sounds like there was an old post where someone asserted that titles can't go negative and LSJ didn't explicitly object.
[/quote]

Was a reference to the post provided?

Because it's easy to find posts where LSJ discusses negative votes and none of those I find say anything about titles bottoming out:

For example
groups.google.com/g/rec.games.trading-cards.jyhad/c/y8ywOLXdEmg/m/YmouHsdWr9oJ

(Having a negative number of votes results in casting 0 votes in the referendum, the same as a negative bleed total results in zero pool loss and not a gain in pool, but that's different from negative votes not being possible.)

I think stealth, intercept, strength, bleed, and votes can all be negative and don't bottom out at 0.

The difference is in handling them. If you have -1 stealth action, -2 intercept minion cannot block it.

The remaining values can be treated as 0 virtually, but are never actually set to 0 just by being negative. If you have -2 votes, you just don't vote as if you had 0 votes, but the value is not bottomed out - if that vampire gains 4 votes, he now has 2, not 4. Strength and bleed follow similar pattern. You can still strike with -1 strength (and don't add blood / life to the target as a cost of healing...) and bleed for -1 (and don't add pool to the target if successful).