(More) Combat in Three Dimensions

Another thread has expressed a desire for support for measuring three dimensions. I'm looking for something more basic, i.e. the basic ability to represent the z axis. I have a Pathfinder wizard who likes to cast Fly, and it's not very easy to work with in roll20. My token overlaps with others below him and there's no way that I can see to represent how high off the ground he is.

I've heard of one person making a virtual altitude stick to one side of the map and had a player adjust the dot on it for the characters height off the ground. I heard of another person using one of the bars on the token to represent the height in ft or yds he was.

Chris N., how do you represent three dimensional combat at the kitchen tabletop? My experience has been that it gets represented by putting it on the board with a note of it's height. - Gauss

When I'm playing in-person and actually using maps, I generally stick the mini on a d6 or the like and use the face that's up to indicate the multiple of 5' squares the character is off of the ground. It's a hacky solution, and not the optimal one (a custom-built structure that would scale up and down as needed) but it "works" (albeit doesn't solve the overlap problem, either).

We often do the same. In Roll20 you can do a similar thing by using a numbered status icon. Alternately, you can put the height in the name of the token or the bars. - Gauss

3 dimensional fighting isn't always just about flight though, recently I had a rather fun fight aboard a train for one of the campaigns I'm in. Some of the enemies were on top of the cars, some were inside. We easily represented this with an icon. However it did give me a thought, would it be possible to allow for multiple map/token layers on a single player screen? Basically you could have it so players are on the roof of one building and inside at the same time. Maybe allow the top layers to see down below if the map is designed with transparency in certain areas (pits, windows, looking over the courtyard from the battlements etc).

Venefcus, unfortunately, when you use large PNGs (which are required for transparencies) they can really slow down people's video processors. So, while you could build something like that it would be ill advised. While it would be cool it would probably cause a major performance hit. Of course, Im not a Developer so this is just my observation. I am often asked to troubleshoot people's maps and the cause for map slowdown is often that they have a PNG maps. - Gauss

I talked to other people and they would recommend multiple maps on the same page but just side by side or below. The ones in the trains would be in the interior map and the ones outside would be on the exterior map. They say that it works the best for what is usable now.