Forum Fight!

Yesterday I got into it on the Paizo boards with some folks over the fact that there are no rules for defining line of sight in Pathfinder. I was not the thread starter on that subject but only jumped in after the fact to try to defend the OP from several sarcastic replies and to agree with him that it seems like it should have been in there.

Now this may seem odd coming from someone claiming to be a "hardcore grognard", needing a definition of "line of sight" and all. I mean, its pretty obvious, line of sight is what you can see. If you can't see it you don't have line of sight. Leave it to your D/GM to let you know if you have line of sight.

However, Pathfinder is not generally a "GM-call" sort of system. Its a very rules heavy system. It has rules for virtually any scenario. If this were Castles & Crusades I wouldn't have even thought twice. C&C is supposed to be rules-light and assumes a lot of GM calls. Pathfinder however, is by no means rules light. Lacking a definition for "line of sight" when it is a mechanical term that is used frequently throughout the rules is a mistake in my opinion.

So now we have to question "why is the rule missing?" Possibilities include:

• It was determined to be unnecessary.
  
• Oops. It was left out by mistake.

After a later post from the OP on that thread, it appears to be more like the latter option. It looks like the 3.5 rules (as well as several other d20-based systems) included definitions for line of sight but in 3.5 it was embedded within a diagram in the PHB that was not included in the SRD and therefore not included in Pathfinder. With that said, I am guessing it was not intentionally left out and later statements saying it wasn't necessary was a CYA sort of deal.

With that said, I grow tired of dealing with Pathfinder. The forums particularly bother me.Originally the Pathfinder forums seemed to be filled with generally polite and helpful people but now it appears to have devolved somewhat. There's a lot of derisive commenting going on over there now.

I think I'm going to take a break from d20pfsrd.com and pushing Pathfinder for a while. The site seems pretty self-sustaining at this point anyway. Traffic grows every day, getting between 1500-2000 visits a day. A half dozen or so people are regularly updating it (though not what I'd always like to be updated) so I'm guess I could drop out of the picture altogether at this point and the site would be fine.

This just gives me more time to focus on Castles & Crusades I guess :)