In Descent, can heroes jump over arbitrary tiles or just pits?

Question

The rules clearly state that heroes can jump over pits, and how much movement it costs to do so.

But in some quests, simply stepping on a regular terrain tile may trigger effects too (in this case, Quest #3 in Well of Darkness, where it triggers a rolling boulder, and can trigger this effect multiple times), and it's a safe bet that once the heroes have triggered that once, they're going to want to jump over that tile the next time they need to get past it.

So, is that allowed? Do we simply assume that the "jump over pits" rule also applies to "jump over blank tiles"? Or is there some official ruling about this?

Answer 1

I don't know about the general case, but the official FAQ does specify that you can NOT jump over water tiles. They give a pretty lame justification for it, but the real reason is that it would break a lot of the scenarios that count on that to act as a barrier. So a good rule of thumb is probably that you also can't jump over "trigger" type tiles that a scenario's challenge is built around. Unfortunately I can't find anything official to back that up, other than the rulebook only specifically mentioning pits in regards to jumping and the FAQ specifically saying you can't jump over water.

That said, in all our games, we always allowed jumping over damaging tiles such as lava, too. Spending the extra extra movement point to avoid a wound (which is pretty much why you'd jump over a pit, too) seemed balanced.