A friend who plays DM, GM, etc. for several gaming groups at his college suggested this house rule for me to try, and I have found it fits theme and game play to add another layer of strategy to the skirmish. My group immediately adopted it and we haven't had a single second of LoS frustration since.

Instead of figures being able to hide behind other figures, we add 1 shield to the defense roll per space occupied by an enemy figure on the LoS path. So shooting through a large monster could still be done, but at the cost of 1 or 2 added shields.

I am sure this ruling isn't going to appeal to everyone, but maybe it is just what you were looking for!

it's an interesting idea, but it seems very susceptible to abuse as the attackers become more powerful in later game.

Bows (and scouts) can do reliable pirece, (look at bow of the eclipse) and might be rolling blue, yellow, red. On top of that, there are skills like the wildlander's "black arrow" which ensure 3 damage as long as it hits.

Why not add a gray die if shooting "through" one space, a black if 2, and disallow shooting through more? Alternately, perhaps a gray per space instead of a shield per space. The idea is to provide some wiggle room, but make shooting through too many figures unrealistic.

I don't know the kind of scenarios that might break our house rule, so that is good to know about wildlander, and we only just started Act 2 for the first time. One of the concerns I had is a mage with Trueshot, but I wasn't sure if it was going to be a big deal. I love the suggestion of adding dice instead of shields. That seems to scale better, and it makes the whole thing a lot riskier, which was our intention to begin with; possible, but increasingly risky for the attacker. Thanks for the suggestion!

I think your house rule breaks many things because it essentially makes line of sight only impair traditional attacks. It imbalances Army of Death and the whole Bounty Hunter class (that normally needs Line of Sight to track monsters at start of turn). Black Arrow was already mentioned as a big problem too, and any other game effect that is intended to be played around through blocking line of sight with figures such as Radiant Light.

I use Imperial Assault line of sight rules in my games. They aren't perfect, but far better than the regular Descent LoS rules in my view. They are also a much less game balance impacting change than the one you propose.

Yeah, there are a lot of abilities (Radiant Light, Army of Death, etc., wildlander's thingy, etc.) and a number of items (elm greatbow, Heart Seeker) that have abilities that are balanced and priced based on the current line of sight rules. Most of the map tiles are also set up with assumptions about choke points and line of sight in mind, so you're really making some very big changes with this (for example, a group of goblin archers behind a one-tile chokepoint just got a *lot* more dangerous with this change).

Just as one example, there's a degenerate combo with Seer Kel's ability (she has line of sight everywhere except through doors), Army of Death, and/or Hexer's Plague Cloud that lets you theoretically destroy something like 20+ monsters in two attacks (the theoretical limit is the number of Hex tokens). This change would, at least on paper, let everyone do that, not just Seer Kel, but some monsters would get a few extra shields.