RolePlay Perspective

I personally dig isometric views. But without a means of ghosting walls/set pieces, it gets a bit cumbersome to use in a VTT. Not to mention that eventually we'll have some pretty lighting effects available in the future that really only works in a top down perspective. Like Patrick, I also miss having a portrait tied to a token ( I think the suggestion thread for that is here - <a href="http://community.roll20.net/discussion/comment/3179#Comment_3179" rel="nofollow">http://community.roll20.net/discussion/comment/3179#Comment_3179</a>). Without that sort of pop-up, one top down token looks very similar to the next top down when zoomed out on the battlemap. I may stick with either from the side view tokens on a top down map, or go with portraits pogs. I'm currently still playing around with a look I like.

I think the trick is not so much using an isometric view but an oblique view-(The bottom right example) <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Graphical_projection_comparison.png" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Graphical_projection_comparison.png</a>. Your Fire Emblem example is using oblique. And with a cursory glance on Google, a lot of classic SNES JRPGs used it too - Final Fantasy 1-6, Chrono Trigger, Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, Secret of Mana, and etc. Pure isometric games like Diablo I-III, Torchlight, and other dungeon crawlers work because they're designed with really complicated layering of graphic elements on screen. An oblique perspective just rotates viewer's perspective on one axis. That way your "ground" is still technically top down view tiles for the most part. Anything that elevates in height shifts backwards from view. I've been playing with a tile set that's offered from Lost Garden - <a href="http://www.lostgarden.com/2006/07/more-free-game-graphics.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.lostgarden.com/2006/07/more-free-game-graphics.html</a> that uses this oblique view. The artist's designed the wall tiles in such a way that interior space shouldn't ever encroach the player. The mapmaker plans around potential wall overlap by allotting a lot of extra wall padding. (You can see what I mean by looking at the interior example supplied on that page. The wall is REALLY thick!) If done right there's minimal, if any, object overlap of the tokens. You just might have to alter an pre-gen adventure pack's map to fit with this scheme.

I've never played with itabletop. Looking at their sample photo of their isometric art in play; it does create a lot of questions for me. For instance: How does the VTT handle the screen when that PC/NPC walks behind a house? The houses and the wagon float over the grid, so you can't see the squares behind these items. Does the VTT make those elements translucent when the PC(s) is behind them? Does the grid appear over the buildings when this happens?