How do stairs interact with range restricted abilities?

If a figure with command is on a stairs tile, and a friendly unit is on the corresponding stair tile, does it get the bonus? If he is 2 squares away will he continue to?

If a figure with divine retribution explodes, will monster figures on the other sides of stairs die?

Would Kirga prevent spawning within 4(5?) squares of the other end of the stairway he's sitting on?

The Rules mention that Attacks can be made across matching staircase tiles as though the two ends were adjacent. Do other effects treat them the same way?

EDIT: Spelling

I would probably extend the adjacent ruling to effects like Command, Spiritwalker, etc etc but that is just my opinion. I'm not sure what the official ruling is.

I would tend to agree that things like command, kirga, and spiritwalker which do not have line of sight restrictions on them can travel up stairways.

Keep in mind that spaces adjacent to stairways can see "up" or "down" the stairs and that figures on stairways have l.o.s. to the spaces adjacent to the adjoining stairway.

What a can of worms.... We've yet to play a quest that even has stairs in it. Can't say I'm looking forward to it.

Veinman said:

Well, if you're OL you will love stairs because you can beastmen by stairs and then send them up against the heroes near the top of the stairs or just get them into the stair space and then attack from that space. It's a beautiful thing.

For heroes, you are caught between wanting to move your whole party forward and wanting to leave someone at the bottom of the stairs to block spawns..of course, this person usually gets a skeleton patrol up his @$$.

Boggs the rat is a super-handy skill/familiar to have in a quest with stairs in it.

Boggs seems to show up in almost all of our games. I keep threatening that I'm going to shred that card.

I'm leaning towards the abilities not traveling up the stairs. The ends of the stairs are only adjacent regarding attacks. When counting range for an effect like command, the two ends are not connected, so it couldn't include the other end.

My $0.02 at least..

snacknuts said:

+1. RAW. Upstairs and downstairs are not actually adjacent to each other, they only count 'as though' adjacent for certain things. They are not actually adjacent or, properly speaking, even connected.

RtL Pg 27
For one movement point, a figure in a staircase space can move to the matching staircase space as though it were adjacent. Attacks may be made across matching staircase spaces as though the two ends were adjacent. A figure on a staircase has a line of sight to the other side of the staircase and all spaces adjacent to it. A figure adjacent to a staircase has line of sight to the other side of the staircase .

Apart from these specific rules there is no connection between different areas conected by stairs.

I think it is a reasonable, and not particularly important, houserule to rule that abilities that 'travel' can at least travel through stairs as limited by LOS (although clearly not Blast or Breath). I don;t see any reason to make that change myself though.

Corbon said:

Breath can't go through stairs, but I don't see why Blast shouldn't. Sweep does, after all.

Basically, Sweep and Blast will hit any part of the stairs within their reach and LoS.

Thundercles said:

Sweep I'll give you.
"Attacks may be made across matching staircase spaces as though the two ends were adjacent"
"Sweep attacks affect all enemy figures within melee range of the attacker ." (Adjacent/+1Reach)

Blast, not so much.
Attacks with the Blast ability affect every space within X spaces of the target space, where X is equal to the rank of the Blast ability.
Top and bottom of stairs are not within any number of spaces of each other. They merely count as though they were adjacent for making attacks across them (ie you could target the blast space (make the attack) through the stairs), not for the results of the attack.
"However, a space is only affected by the attack if it has line of sight to the target space (ignoring figures for this purpose)."
This part is a restrictive clause not a definitive clause. Having LOS does not guarantee the blast reaching that spot, only being within X spaces is teh criteria for that.

However, once again, its very RAW and a pretty minor are for Houseruling. However if I was going to houserule this in any way it would be to eliminate sweeping through stairs (sorry, the narrow opening kinda spoils the swing, ya know?) and have blast affecting only the other end staircase space (limited explosion throw an aperture). Honestly, Breath should do better than both these at going up stairways but is specificallty excluded (probabl;y for reasons of ease-of-play - I mean, where does the template fit/cover?).

Huh, I guess I always assumed that having LoS granted the ability to attack stuff, and that you could assume the stairs were each 1 space away from each other. That way, Blast 3 from one side of the stairs would be able to hit the other. However, I think you're right, you can stand on one staircase and blast the crap out of the other and not suffer any ill effect.

It's always so easy to mistakenly add third dimension mechanics into this board game, even when they're not actually in the rules.

Corbon said:

Just found this in the old wiki. Probably we should copy the entire wiki page to the GLoAQ, clearly notifying the age of this!

3.2 Q: "Stairwell. Let's say I have a character who can attack with a blast weapon. She is standing on a stairwell and has line of sight to the corresponding stairwell as well as the adjacent spaces. If she fires at one of the adjacent spaces, and gives it a total of Blast 4, does the blast travel back through the strairwell?"

A: Yes
Related Rulebook Paragraphs: ??
Source: Mike Z, http://www.fantasyflightgames.com/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.cgi?num=1132764726

Parathion said:

<shrug> So be it. Just another unsupported ruling...

Why unsupported? MikeZ counted as "official" at that time.

Parathion said:

Indeed, hence the 'so be it'. However (and no personal disrespect to Mike Z) it does continue the FFG tradition (well, in Descent anyway) of relatively random 'rulings' that aren't supported by the RAW, especially in earlier times.
Basically, any time someone asked a question, someone 'official' made up an answer without really paying any attention to what the existing rules said. Hence the tradition of inconsistent (and often blatantly contradictory), vague and muddled rulings, explanations and answers.

Still an awesome game though!

Of course, there are no rules for calculating distance across stairs, as far as I can tell. In particular, it's not clear whether a space adjacent to a staircase is also adjacent to the corresponding stair token, or 2 spaces away from it.

Antistone said:

I thought only the stairs were adjacent to each other, so that the space around one stair token is two spaces away from the other stair token.

Thundercles said:

Only the actual stair spaces are considered adjacent for purposes of movement. But as I said, as far as I can tell, there's no rules for distance of anything else across stairs.

Actually, the stairs are only considered adjacent for purposes of an attack.

Regarding movement, by RAW they are no more adjacent than a glyph and the town tile.

Parathion said:

what does that even mean?

Thundercles said:

Stairs are not actually adjacent.
You can move between corresponding stair spaces for 1 MP, but they are still not adjacent.
Attacks may be made across matching stair spaces as though the two ends were adjacent (what that actually means is not clear - for purposes of eligible targets? for purposes of ranges? for purposes of blast areas? for purposes of adjacent spaces (gold ranged item), for any and all purposes during an attack? For the purposes of counting spaces (Blessing, Spiritwalker, Black Curse etc)?).
There are special, unique, LOS rules around matching stair spaces.

DRtL pg 27
For one movement point, a figure in a staircase space can move to the matching staircase space as though it were adjacent. Attacks may be made across matching staircase spaces as though the two ends were adjacent. A figure on a staircase has a line of sight to the other side of the staircase and
all spaces adjacent to it. A figure adjacent to a staircase has line of sight to the other side of the staircase

it is a poorly written sequence of rules actually.
Most people, I think, consider 'making' an attack to cover everything involved in the attack from step (1) to step (last), meaning stairs become effectively adjacent to each other for nearly all purposes.
It is possible to consider 'making an attack' to be the declaration - ie fulfilling eligibility criteria for the attack (adjacent for melee, LOS for Ranged/Magic) which then prevents such things as Spiritwalker (maybe), Blessing and Black Curse being counted 'through' a set of stairs. In other words, you can 'act' through the stairs, can cannot 'benefit'(/penalty) through them. Possible, though dubious IMO.

Kirga's special however, as an example, cannot be traced through a staircase, as the stair spaces are not adjacent to each other.

Q: "Stairwell. Let's say I have a character who can attack with a blast weapon. She is standing on a stairwell and has line of sight to the corresponding stairwell as well as the adjacent spaces. If she fires at one of the adjacent spaces, and gives it a total of Blast 4, does the blast travel back through the strairwell?"

A: Yes

Related Rulebook Paragraphs: ??
Source: Mike Z, http://www.fantasyflightgames.com/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.cgi?num=1132764726

This does seem to me, to indicate that stairs are actually adjacent to eachother in every aspect. *shrugs*

edderkoppen said:

I still don't quite understand the whole picture here.

Facts:

1) You can move from one staircase space to another for 1 mp
2) During an attack, you can make an attack from one tile to the other as if they were adjacent to each other.
3) LoS can be traced both ways from one staircase to the other staircase and all the spaces around it.

so.

Clearly the stairs cannot transmit Command, Kirga, Aura, etc. (unless stairs are made adjacent for all purposes). However, that still leaves the matter of non-template-based area attacks, and counting range to and from the squares around stair tiles.

If the stair squares are adjacent, then they are 1 space away from each other for the purposes of attacks, obviously. However, how would we treat the spaces adjacent to the stairs according to the rules as written? I believe that there doesn't need to be a special written rule about how far Spaces Adjacent to Stairs (SAS for short) are from the opposite stair tile, because, in most other cases, if a space A is adjacent to a space B which is adjacent to a space C (A and C not adjacent to each other), A and C are considered to be 2 spaces away from each other. How that concept fails to apply here is what confuses me.

Thundercles said:

That would be one reasonable generalization (with the additional caveat that A and C must be different spaces), but the rules don't actually give a well-defined procedure for calculating distance.

"the attacking player counts the number of spaces from the space occupied by the attacking figure to the targeted space. This is the range of the attack." (JitD rules page 10)

That's seriously the only instructions on calculating distance I can find anywhere in the rulebook (the word "distance" isn't even in the rulebook, despite the fact that "range" already means something else and they don't use the term consistently). There's also an example diagram on page 11, but it only shows orthogonal distances. Which is odd, because I seem to recall receiving a stronger impression than that when I first read the rulebook that diagonal distances were max(dx, dy) rather than dx+dy or sqrt(dx^2 + dy^2). So maybe there's a passage somewhere I'm missing.

Anyway, the problem is, we're given a contra-indication on the path issue: "a figure standing adjacent to one end of a staircase has line of sight to the other end of the staircase" (p. 17). There's nothing to indicate that that this LOS is contingent upon the near end of the staircase being unoccupied. That is, it doesn't say you have LOS to the far end of the stairs through the near end of the stairs; going by RAW, you can see directly to the far end of the stairs, even if there's a monster on the near end.

And if LOS isn't traced through the near end of the stairs, then it's difficult to see why range ought to be traced through it, absent any explicit instruction to do so. I'll grant you it would be very weird if the distance was greater than two, but distance is measured by the shortest of all possible paths, so the fact that there definitely exists one path of length 2 to the target doesn't necessarily guarantee that no shorter path exists.

So basically, we have to guess whether they want distance to default to working through adjacency or working like LOS. And things are further complicated by the fact that it is entirely plausible that they just left out an important detail, like maybe that you're supposed to trace LOS through the near end of the stairs or that the squares you have LOS to on the other side of the stairs are also supposed to be considered adjacent for purposes of attacks (but not movement), or whatever. That's exactly the sort of mistake the Descent writers make all over the place.