I have some questions on how distance is calculated with certain skills and abilities that mention "within X spaces of" in their description, such as:

- Divine Retribution (DR)
- Runewitch Astarra's ability
- Kirga's ability

Within X spaces. How is this distance calculated? Do you have to be able to count the actual spaces of the shortest route leading to the spot that is to be affected? Does that take into account obstacles and/or doors? Or do these abilities pass through walls as well?
Is the term "spaces" meant to be actual spaces on the board, or do "fictional" spaces between the building blocks of a dungeon count too?

Take a look at the image. Assume vanilla Descent rules (6 spaces for Astarra). Suppose the master beastman is Runewitch Astarra, who has the skill Divine Retribution.
The door next to her is closed, but the area behind it has been revealed already. Suppose she just moved to the spot she is in now. Does the glyph flip? Her ability can only activate the glyph if it makes use of "Spot A", as marked on the image.

In my opinion (which might be biased as an OL) the rune doesn't flip, because I think the path towards the glyph should be traceable on the gameboard itself. However, I have players argueing with me that the rune should flip. Hence my question.

Same situation as before. Suppose the Runewitch is killed by an enemy figure on the spot she's in right now. Which of the skeletons die?
- The DR effect could be considered similar to a Blast attack: None of the Skeletons die because a Blast 3 attack on the space that the Runewitch occupies (which is basically what the DR simulates), doesn't affect any of the Skeletons.
- Skeleton 1 only dies if Obstacles are not taken into account when determining the area of effect (AoE) for the DR.
- Skeleton 2 only dies if closed doors do not affect the AoE of DR.
- Skeleton 3 only dies if the AoE of DR goes through walls.

I didn't create an example to illustrate Kirga's ability, but I assume it follows the same guidelines as the DR skill and the Runewitch's ability. Kirga's ability is the only one that specifies that LoS and other effects don't affect it. Still, the question remains about the walls.

The rules aren't explicit about this, but I have always played that walls are impermeable to all effects, and that closed doors function as walls. This dovetails nicely with treating unrevealed areas as if they didn't exist, and while there is no clear statement (anywhere I can find) regarding what walls should block, and the list for doors isn't "everything," there is nothing in the game that explicitly has the ability to go through walls or closed doors, either.

Rubble blocks movement and line-of-sight, but none of the effects under discussion require either of those, so I can think of no reason to suppose that rubble would block them.

So in your diagram, the rune doesn't fllip, and divine retribution kills skeleton 1 but none of the others.

As far as I can tell, this should work the same was as Command, which as near as I can tell, does ignore walls completely. Obviously, they wouldn't effect creatures in unrevealed areas, because technically they don't exist yet.

Antistone said:

While the doors = walls is a nice analogy and makes the game smoother, I don't see any backing for it in the rules. There are specific effects for closed doors. They stop movement (DJitD pg9, 13), LOS (pg10, 13), 'spells and weapons' (spells not being defined, but most likely meaning magical attacks, pg13) and all attacks (pg13). They also stop blast effects (breath effects already being stopped by virtue of being an attack, whereas a blast attack may land on one side of the door as the attack, and extend past the doorway, pg22).

They are not mentioned as stopping other special effects including Command, Divine Retribution and Runewitch Astarra/Kirga's special abilities. It could be possible to argue that some of these abilities might be due to spells, but largely not, and none of them is clearly defined as a spell.

Therefore closed doors RAW do not stop these effects.
Naturally, since nothing behind an closed door to an unrevealed area exists yet, although these effects may pass through such closed doors, there is nothing there for them to 'affect'.

As for supposed spaces in the gaps between tiles, there are no such things. All of these effects require a measurement in 'spaces'. There are no spaces betwen the tiles because although we could possible extend the gridlines between spaces on the tiles the game does not instruct us to do so and the area outside the tile does not exist. In game terms the 'space' at A does not exist and therefore cannot be counted.

So, the rune doesn't flip and skeletons 1 and 2 will be killed by DR - at least RAW.
Antistone's house rule does simplify some things though.

The thing is, there are multiple statements in the rules listing things that doors block, and they don't match each other, so I'm not convinced any of them were intended to be exhaustive. And we don't have any examples of any effect that is definitively not blocked by doors. We also have nothing I can find that even resembles an exhaustive list of effects blocked by walls, so if you're going to say that things can go through doors because we have no explicit rule either way, why can't they go through walls, too?

The argument about off-board spaces doesn't apply when you have two tiles adjacent to each other but not connected, and if you say that effects don't extend through in those cases because the walls block them, then there's no need to also say that you can't trace them off-board, since you can't get off-board without going through walls.

Corbon said:

+1 with a Hell yes.

Antistone said:

Umm, what?

Under Movement (pg 9) we have that closed doors block movement.

Under LOS (pg 9/10, part of the attack rules) we have closed doors block LOS.

Under Doors (pg 13) we have Movement, LOS and all Attacks (even those not requiring LOS) being blocked by closed doors.
That is pretty much a definitive, exhaustive list of effects blocked by closed doors under Doors. The only other thing is Blast, which is a exceptional case and, as usual, covered under the blast rules. I don't see any mismatch unless you include the undefined 'spells' which is IMO descriptive and even if not, very probably means magical attacks. Each part of the rules has the appropriate information, and the Doors part has all the information.
We do have Flame template being blocked by closed doors in the FAQ but IMO that is a clarification rather than a rules change. It isn't strictly needed because Breath templates are used for Attacks which are specifically blocked by closed doors. Obviously some people didn't make make the connection and needed something more explicit, but the original RAW did already cover this. The same goes for Sweep attacks.

I don't see any need for an example of something that is not blocked by closed doors. We have doors and a list of what they block.

Walls you have a better case for. The only thing that walls block apparently is LOS and Blast (and Breathe Template by FAQ, which seems to be a change, obviously because they didn't define walls enough). OTOH since nothing exists outside the walls, there is nothing to pass out to and then nothing to pass back in from. The fact that spaces separately by walls (be it 1mm thick walls or several space think walls) are not adjacent and have no 'number of spaces' between them means that no other effects are able to pass through walls anyway as the described method for every effect I can think of requires either adjacency or counting spaces (which are counted adjacent space to adjacent space).
In fact, as I look at what I wrote and what you wrote, they are the same. The argument is not that walls are impenetrable (they apparently are not, except to LOS and blast/breath), it is just that there is no way to pass through them and then back onto the gameboard.

"Every space that is touching a given space (even at the corners) is adjacent to that given space." (JitD p. 4)

"Every other space that touches a given space (even diagonally) is said to be adjacent to that space." (JitD p. 6)

Spaces on separate map pieces with a wall between them are still adjacent if the map pieces are touching.

When two rooms are connected directly, every discussion I've seen allows figures to move diagonally through the wall's end point. If those diagonal spaces are touching, then the two spaces on opposite sides of the wall must be touching, since obviously they need to share at least one point in order for both the diagonals to be "touching" and for the map to be planar.

The doors argument, I'll admit is kind of flimsy; I seem to have mis-remembered "...that block all spells and weapons" as something that sounded more obviously like a list. Still, "closed doors block movement, line of sight, and all attacks" sounds suspiciously like an attempt to list everything they could possibly block (plagued by the usual bad editing) to me. We know that we don't have an exhaustive list for walls, and doors are more similar to walls than they are to anything else in the game. We also don't actually have a rule that states that things in unrevealed areas don't have any effect, even though it is logistically impossible that they would--an omission that is more understandable if they are unable to affect any revealed areas even if they did exist.

Do you also allow Aura, Grapple, and Swarm to work through closed doors?

Antistone said:

Yep, you've found a loophole on the adjacent thing. The two spaces each diagonally touching a point at the edge of a door, although separated by a wall are officially adjacent as they share a point. However I don't agree that they are otherwise touching along the line between them (not that that is important, and not that I think you claimed this).
That really does screw everything up, since walls don't officially block movement. Unless doors extend from outer point to outer point and also prevent the use of that point for adjacency purposes. But that is a complex definition and there is nothing structured that way in the RAW at all.

Aura and Swarm have never come up in our games trying to operate through closed doors. We have run into the Grapple thing, decided it was stupid and house-ruled that despite the RAW the grapple would 'end' when the door was closed. However the question was almost moot since closing doors requires the expenditure of MP and anything adjacent to the door (it was a corridor rather than a room IIRC) would also be affected by the grapple. I think in the end I used a second monster operating in the same space as the grappled one (so not grappled) to close the door, thereby freeing the grappled monster according to the house rule we'd made on the spot.
I don't think I ever remembered that before when discussing house rules as it only ever happened once.

I am sure we would do the same again. All three abilities (Aura Grapple and Swarm) work by adjacency and spaces on either side of a door are officially adjacent. Since there is no mention of these items being blocked by Doors, RAW they work through doors. I agree that I definitely don't think that they should, just that they do. Similar to the 'see into but not out of pits rule' these are ones we would houserule. Everbody has their lines in the sand for 'nonsensical', 'can't get my imagination around that' and 'understanding that its there for ease-of-play' and this rule breaks all three for me.

Edit: I'll just add that like I said earlier, I think 'closed doors = walls' is a good simplification. Just not that there is any justification for it RAW.

Corbon said:

I do claim that. The only way I can think of to possibly argue that they're not touching is to say that there is some tiny physical space between the map pieces, and that's a farcical argument; they're obviously touching to within a reasonable manufacturing tolerance of the pieces. By that argument, you could argue that even spaces joined by connectors are not adjacent if the connection is loose. Besides, spaces are also defined as squares depicted on the map (p.6), so the exact physical dimensions of the pieces are clearly not intended to be relevant.

Now, from a perspective of principle, it's not important, insofar as you've already agreed that there is at least one case in which walls are obviously intended to block something that the rules don't explicitly say that they block. From a practical standpoint, though, this makes the breach much wider, and thus makes a fix more important.

Also, an additional reason for treating closed doors as walls occurs to me. That diagonal move between two rooms? It's not blocked by the wall when the door is open, because you can move diagonally through the endpoint of a wall. But it's not blocked by the door when it's closed, either, for the same reason (kind of like how you can move between two diagonally adjacent obstacles that touch at a point). The only way that the rooms are actually sealed and separate when the door is closed is if the wall plus the door counts as a single contiguous barrier.

Sorry for the double-post; thought of something else, and if I edit my post, I'm sure the quote tags will break.

"Boulders block line of sight and are treated as a wall for purposes of blocking line of sight, attacks, and movement ." (WoD p.5)

Someone writing the rules thinks that walls block more than the rules say they do.

Of course, if we go with the theory that they didn't specify what walls block because spaces on opposite sides of walls aren't touching and thus you can't trace through them anyway...then why specify that walls block LOS?

Antistone said:

That additional reason was the loophole I was talking about I think. RAW you can bypass closed doors by moving diagonally through the end of a door or even straight through between the two spaces on opposite sides of the door but touching the same end of the door (ie that I am claiming are separated by a wall). However they are still adjacent because they touch corner to corner. Its a pretty big loophole and easily the worst I've seen in Descent I think. And it definitely needs closing!

As for touching along a line, even your own Enduring Evil quest guide shows them as not touching. For example, Quest one between Area 1 and Area 3. The NE corner of Area 1 'touches' the SW corner of Area 3 along two space edges. I'd definitely describe that as there being a 'gap', however infinitesimally small, between those two areas, as there is indeed between the physical tiles. Just as there is a 'gap' between the central 4 spaces in area 3. The same gap exists between the aforementioned loophole spaces.
I don't accept the 'spaces are squares therefore they fill all the 'space' in that square' argument. Clearly the way the rules work shows us that a space is a space and all of a space has the same value as any part of the space. And each space is a general square shape by convention ('depiction', though really there is no particular necessity for it to be so). Therefore I agree that the exact physical dimensions of a space are not intended to be relevant. Since the exact dimensions aren't relevant there is therefore enough flexibility within the dimensions to enable a 'gap' between two spaces clearly not created to be adjacent (at least side to side ).
It is amusing that we take the exact same reasoning to reach opposite conclusions here. You appear to conclude that since the exact physical dimensions are not relevant we must expand out the pictures to entirely fill the 'square' and thus what should be non-adjacent spaces end up adjacent. I conclude that since the exact physical dimensions are not relevant there is room to have a gap between spaces that are clearly not intended to be adjacent and are neither drawn (depicted) adjacent nor always physical touching when physical tiles are used.

Just managed to catch your second reply...

"Someone writing the rules thinks that walls block more than the rules say they do."
Yep. So did most of us. So did I until I went looking during this thread.
They still effectively do , apart from the loophole near doors.

"Of course, if we go with the theory that they didn't specify what walls block because spaces on opposite sides of walls aren't touching and thus you can't trace through them anyway...then why specify that walls block LOS?
Because LOS doesn't specify adjacency is required, or use definitions of space count distances, just no blocking obstacle centre to centre?
And if a wall doesn't block LOS some idiot will point out that the 'nothing' in between tiles by its very definition doesn't prevent LOS - its nothing! If a wall didn't break LOS you could trace LOS between widely separated areas with 'nothing' in between them. For example Area 2 and Area 4 in EE quest 2. There are plenty of places you could put a piece of string at the centre on a space in area 2 through to the centre of a space in area 4 and the string would not pass through any non-wall LOS obstructor! Case closed for a dodgy rules lawyer.

Khellendros said:

I'm not going to get involved in the extended debate about what RAW says or doesn't say (I absolutely loathe rules arguments that devolve to the point of defining individual words in the English language), but for my money the best reference for these questions is the part about the breath template in the FAQ. The breath template can hit any target within its area if a small (one-space) flying creature could legally move from the point of origin to the target while staying within the template. Walls will block the template, but the template can potentially billow out and around the wall (as illustrated in the FAQ) so the creature using Breath doesn't necessarily need LOS.

I apply the same example to everything you've brought up here. Astarra's and Kirga's abilities and the DR blast radius are functionally templates that affect a full 360 "circular" area around the space the hero is standing in. The effects cannot leave the board or cross "empty spaces" between tiles because there aren't any spaces off the board, empty or otherwise. The only spaces that exist in the game are the ones drawn on the tiles themselves, period. Walls will block the effects because they prevent the hypothetical flying creature from moving legally. I generally allow Astarra's and Kirga's abilities to go through closed doors because it would seem to be in line with the intended spirit of those abilities (provided of course the area on the other side is revealed - Astarra cannot activate glyphs that haven't been put on the map yet). I do not allow DR to go through a closed door.

This post is being presented as my opinion and how I and my group play the game. I do not claim to have considered every minute rule in the game, nor do I intend to defend my position from such scrutiny. It's just an answer to the OP's question for consideration, take it or leave it.

My group has changed how we handle this several times... Currently we use the breath template rules/example with everything that involves something happening within a given range.

In the past we had command going through stairs, closed doors, etc.. we finally decided the unified theory was better (simpler).

Ruling on 'Common Sense' would usually suggest the following:

a) Astara's ability is within a certain "area" of effect, thus passing through "illusory" wall spaces.

b) Divine Retribution is an effect from an angry deity; rubble and doors are unlikely to stop a "mini-divine-nuke" placed on the spot, but walls would prevent the passage.

c) Kirga essentially being a Hunter/Trapper looking type would generally be assumed to be 5 squares "a 1-square flying creature" could reach, thus being stopped by doors and the like.

Having said that, when these ones came up in our group, we found that the best solutions for fairness on both sides were:

a) Astara's ability must trace a line through six legal (aka non-illusory wall squares) to the glyph. (Command followed this one as well, can't yell through a wall.)

b) Divine Retribution followed the same ruling, ignoring rubble and door-type obstacles.

c) Kirga's ability we allowed to pass through doors as well, because the amount of times he could have been mauled by a beastman pack right on the other side of the door just seemed ridiculous. :/

Corbon said:

Heh. Do you really need in the rules, that walls DO block movement?

Kard said:

I agree w this. FFG went to the extent to clarify in the breath example using the 1-square flying creature. They didnt apply that to all such area effects, but I think it applies. For area effects like Runewitch, Aura, Command, Grapple, the effect is valid if a 1-square flying creature could reach such in the designated number of spaces.

Corbon said:

OK, I specifically anticipated this argument, and you quoted my response, and then totally ignored it. I don't know why I bother.

We are in agreement that walls are obviously intended to block stuff that the rules don't actually say that they block. Since there is nothing that we definitively know works through walls, "everything" is as reasonable a guess at what walls are supposed to block as anything else, plus it has Occam's Razor going for it.

Antistone said:

Umm... sorry for offending your sensibilities? I thought I did spend some time explaining why I came to a different conclusion, further down.

Anyway, yes, I agree that walls should probably block 'everything'. And in fact have always played that way.
I just don't agree that doors are the same as walls while closed. We may have to agree to disagree on that part.