So what do you do when your deck is empty , but some card effect somewhere (like an encounter) says you must discard some cards off the top of your deck ?

Looked in the rules, and it doesn't specify this instance (that I could find which is why I'm asking this question here), but it does talk about drawing cards however, I would treat that as different things. Because in the rule reference (pg. 9) it refers to drawing a card as taking the top card of your deck and adding it to your hand . Inversely, we can treat discarding as taking a card from a source (like hand, play area or deck ) and placing it in the discard pile (which also has a section in the Rule Reference, but doesn't help to answer this question).

I think that when put in this situation, you discard as many cards as you can until you can no longer, leaving your deck empty . On a future turn, or when called to draw , that player would need to then reshuffle their discard pile to reform their deck and take a horror as per the draw rules, but i wanted to ask the question here to see if someone could set me straight or we could confirm that is how it should be played.

basically: discard (specifically from the deck) and draw are different things, right? discarding wouldn't prompt the player to reshuffle their deck once they ran out of cards if they needed to continue discarding cards from their deck , would it?

If an effect says you must discard cards off the top of your deck and it's empty, I would treat it the same as if I were instructed to draw a card and the deck is empty, the difference being that the cards drawn are discarded rather than taken into hand.

There is a rule question submission place for things like this, and often, when an odd question like this is posed, someone takes it and goes to get an official answer. For future reference, here is that link: https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/contact/rules/

In this case, I submitted the question, and when I have the answer I'll come back here. My gut says you discard nothing, but we'll see how the cards fall.

And, uhhh, just a link you might like to look at: http://www.infogineering.net/under-10-rule-bold.htm

No serious offense meant, of course!

Discarding does not trigger a reshuffle on its own. The encounter deck will shuffle itself automatically after a discard effect reduces it to zero, however (because the encounter deck shuffles back to full after it hits zero cards).

On the other hand, player decks have to wait for a draw effect to reshuffle their discard into their deck (which will, of course, cost you 1 horror). You continue to finish up however many cards you're supposed to draw after reshuffling.

Gaffa got it right, just as my instinct (and reading of the rules) had me believe. And here's the official words from Matthew Newman:

Quote

Players don’t shuffle their investigator decks until they are forced to draw a card and their deck is empty. If your deck is empty and you are instructed to discard 1 or more cards from the top of your deck, nothing happens.