Line of Sight / Effect question

[Xavram5]

We've had this come up a couple of times. A player can't see a particular spot. It's not blocked but its either outside his vision/light source, in a fog cloud, something like that. We've been ruling that you can't drop a Fireball or Holy Smite on a "spot" that you can't see but I'm starting to wonder if that's correct.

Mind you, nothing is BLOCKING the line of effect from the player to where he wants to put his AoE spell (there are no walls or obstructions) but he can't actually SEE the spot he's trying to target.

Are we playing this right?

[Quantum Steve]

You can blind fire area spells as long as you have LOE. Targeted spells need LOS.

[DM_Blake]

You do not need to see the origin of an area spell, you only need line of effect.

So you can Fireball an enemy in a fog cloud or in a dark room, etc.

But remember, this can get hard to do - fairly - if you're using miniatures on a battle mat. It's very easy to "metagame" the targeting of such spells when there are miniatures on the table in plain sight. In fact, it's almost impossible not to. Even the best roleplayers might say "well, that room is dark so I shouldn't be able to see those orc miniatures and I won't cast a fireball in there because I'm not supposed to be sure where the enemy is" - but the same player, confronted with an empty room with no miniatures (but reason to believe there are orcs in there) would happily fireball the dark room, so by avoiding "metagaming" even the best roleplayers limit their freedom to choose actions they might choose without the out-of-character information (seeing miniatures on the table when their own character has no LOS to the enemy).

As a GM, when there is no LOS to any miniature, I remove it from the battle mat, even if it's a PC. I mentally move around the enemies and PCs in my mind (receiving notes from any player who is moving his unseen character) and track it all without using the battle mat - this frees up my players to play their own knowledge because it's identical to their PCs' knowledge, without metagaming.

[Claxon]

I believe if you do not have line of sight to something, including an area, you cannot target it with a ranged attack. Including spells.

However, this gets tricky. If for instance there is a fog effect in an otherwise open plain a wizard could drop a fireball on top of the center of fog (most likely) as his sight isn't completely obscured by the fog, just the contents inside. If the wizard is surrounded by fog which just leaves him in sphere with unclouded vision I would say he can't target anything beyond the edge of his spehre of sight.

Unfortunately the term line of sight isn't really expanded on.

Edit: Never mind, seems I'm wrong.