Staircases and Line of Sight

By sonofzeal, in Descent: Journeys in the Dark

So, I'm in the middle of a game, and we paused due to a rules argument that got vicious and a little personal.

Here are the relevant stair rules . I'd copy-paste them, but the paste doesn't seem to be working in Chrome atm.

The situation : Silhouette is standing on the top of a staircase, with a ranged weapon. Nanok is standing at the base, adjacent to a Blood Ape that is attacking him.

The Overlord's claim: Line of sight is traced through the base of the staircase, therefore Silhouette cannot attack the Blood Ape because Nanok blocks her LoS unless she has the Precision talent, which she does not in this case,

The Player's claim: The rules for staircases say that she has LoS to all spaces adjacent to the other end of the staircase, and there's no caveat preventing this from working. Thus, by a literal reading of the rules, she has LoS to all 9 squares in the other zone regardless of what's in any of them. This is partially justified by 3D geometry; if she was standing 10 feet above Nanok's square, he couldn't block her vision relevantly.

sonofzeal said:

So, I'm in the middle of a game, and we paused due to a rules argument that got vicious and a little personal.

Here are the relevant stair rules . I'd copy-paste them, but the paste doesn't seem to be working in Chrome atm.

The situation : Silhouette is standing on the top of a staircase, with a ranged weapon. Nanok is standing at the base, adjacent to a Blood Ape that is attacking him.

The Overlord's claim: Line of sight is traced through the base of the staircase, therefore Silhouette cannot attack the Blood Ape because Nanok blocks her LoS unless she has the Precision talent, which she does not in this case,

The Player's claim: The rules for staircases say that she has LoS to all spaces adjacent to the other end of the staircase, and there's no caveat preventing this from working. Thus, by a literal reading of the rules, she has LoS to all 9 squares in the other zone regardless of what's in any of them. This is partially justified by 3D geometry; if she was standing 10 feet above Nanok's square, he couldn't block her vision relevantly.

I think technically the player is right. And if you think of the staircase as winding around the walls of a upward hole, like a well, its a clever justification too. (I always thought of the staircase as winding around a column or being enclosed, but that clearly wouldn't work the way the LOS rules suggest).
Definitely the LOS is not 'checked' in the same way as it would normally be because the staircase spaces simply aren't physically connected in a way that allows this.

Hard luck OL. OTOH, you can now shoot past Nanok to the more fragile Silhouette.