Actions are a resource in a Dominion that you can spend. It makes absolutely no sense to have negative Actions. You can only spend resources that you actually have.
And you're free to have your cards follow that rule if you wish. As of now, there is no ruling one way or another on whether Actions or Buys can go negative, so you can't really say whether it makes sense or not if there's no precedent. Actions are only a counter after all, and there's nothing inherent to them that demands non-negativity.
None of the 4 basic resources of the game can become negative. It is common-sensical, you can only spend stuff that you have.
Coins also cannot become negative, Debt is a totally different mechanism.
I'm not sure what your concern is, of course none of the 4 basic resources go negative in the base game, that's the entire point of fan mechanics. If it were already part of the game, then we wouldn't be discussing it here. Coins and the like cannot become negative because there are no cards with negative vanilla bonuses, that's the entire point of this contest. And regardless, the possibility of negative actions doesn't mean you can continue to use actions while negative to become even further negative. If you have 0 or less actions, you can't play any actions. Your statement "you can't spend what you don't have" isn't applicable here. None of these fan cards allow you to do that.
So your card implies that you can once go under zero with Actions but once you are in the negative realm you cannot play another card with -Actions.
Dude, that’s hyperunintuitive.
Spend X Actions is a fine mechanism. -X Actions with some weird „you can go once below zero but once you are you cannot play other -X Action cards“ rule is not.
Think about when you would go below zero. I never stated my card allows you to go below zero once. The rules around my card were "Do what the card says. If you do not have 1 or more actions afterwards, you cannot play another card", just like any other card. If you play a -1 Action card, that means you had 1 action, and were thus allowed to play a card, now having 0, do what the card says, and now have -1. You cannot play another action. It's exactly the same as playing any other terminal. You are not "allowed to go below once and then not again", you are simply allowed to play any action card if you have 1 action available, and if you are at 0 you can't play an action card period. It would be less intuitive if you couldn't play a -1 Action card while having 1 action. And anyway, the only time it matters whether or not you have 0 or -1 is when it comes to how many villagers you need to get back to 1 action. Once again, you are free to implement it however you wish.
Dude, you explicitly said that Steel Foundry means that you can end up with -1 Action and you just said it again. So according to you you can most definitely go below zero with the Action counter.
My point is that this is a total mess rule-wise (gee, the very fact that we have this discussion shows this). It makes far more sense to implement it Storyteller-style as „spend an Action“ which means that you need two Actions to play Steel Foundry.
Spending resources is cool, it is a basic mechanism familiar to anybody who plays Euros. But being able to spend stuff that you don’t have, man, just no. There is no precedent for this in Dominion, it will lead to quite some confusion and it also makes the card itself behave very weird (no idea about why you sting to it, all it achieves is make the card better suited for money).
Yes, Steel Foundry does make you end with -1 Action if its the only card you play. What I was countering is your supposition that it only allows you to go negative *once* as if that were a special rule, which you were implying. Why would it make more sense for some Actions to take 2 to play but most to take 1? There's no precedent for that either. And anyway, why are you using precedent to justify what does or doesn't make sense on a competition that's literally about fan mechanics. There's no precedent for anything we do here, by definition. Being able to go negative on a resource is not so outlandish a concept that it doesn't appear in other games. And once again, you aren't spending what you don't have, you are simply following the cards instructions. If you look at my original post, I also have Stock Exchange, which *does* ask you spend Actions, and for *that* card, you can only spend Actions that you have. I agree that for a story-teller type card, you shouldn't be able to spend more than you have. But -1 Action as a vanilla bonus isn't spending anything, it's updating a counter. That's why it doesn't say "Spend an action, you may go negative."
You keep interpreting it as something that it is not, and that's fine, you are free to make your own card that does work the way you want it to. That's the point of this contest, I never said you have to treat -1 Actions the way I did, nor that I was biased to my own implementation. If you submit your story-teller style smithy variant, I will gladly judge it on its merits and not consider the way you decided to implement -1 Actions as any way inferior to my own. At the end of the day, this is a fan card, and a fan card mechanic, and like the English language, their our know rules.
While I mostly agree with you, I would like to point out that Poor House gives -
and
cannot go negative, which makes it somewhat unclear just by looking at the card whether you can go negative on Actions or not (which usually doesn't matter; I believe Villagers and CotR are the only cases where -1 vs 0 Actions makes a difference). I would therefore recommend specifying on the card itself: "-1 Action (you can go below 0)."
Also, one rules question I just thought of: What happens if you have negative Actions and Diadem? Does Diadem's extra effect give -
? Or does Diadem still give
total? And if it loses
because of KC/TRing Steel Foundries, can you go negative simply because neither specifies that you can't go below
? And if so, what happens with Poor House? If you play Poor House when you're at -
and Poor House wouldn't give net +
, would it still raise you to
because it does specify that you can't go below
? And does it make it so that you can't go below
for the rest of your turn, or just for its own effect?