Suppose, for a moment, that I want to run a setting wherein nearly

>>50347027
nope.

Sorry mate, you'll have to break away from your habit of autistically modelling everything that doesn't really needs autistic modelling and just run your touhou game like papa ZUN intended - on a 2d plane.

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>>50347063

This is not actually a Touhou game or setting, and "spell card combat" would be a contrived fit.

Grab your favorite grid based game, then put a "height dice" on the tokens.

Characters on different heights can't melee each-other. You can switch your height by 1 as part of a move action.

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>>50347188

Would this not still require awkward token-stacking on MapTool or Roll20? This could get quite unwieldy in a battle with over a dozen combatants.

>>50347232
until we get some sort of 3d virtual table that isn't dogshit, there's nothing you can do about it, fampai.

>>50347232
>>50347240
Yeah, I have no idea how you could avoid that in a 2d plane. Is there maybe an isometric one?

Maybe if it was sideview 2d instead? If height is more important than the background/foreground motion, that could be good.

>>50347027
Here's an idea.
Divide the aerial space into, I dunno, 5 hypotetical levels. The 1st and 5th are for combatants that are flying far below or far above the rest of the battle, so they're not affected by any proximity-related rules with the other levels(ex. if you have something similar to 'ranged attacks of opportunity' or stuff like that) while the 2nd, 3rd and 4th represent the actual core of your aerial skirmish.

Use some cool rules to implement movement from one level to another. For example, it takes half a movement to go from 2nd or 4th to 3rd or vice-versa, while it takes a full movement to go from 2nd or 3rd to 1st, from 3rd or 4th to 5th, or from 1st to 2nd or 3rd, or from 5th to 4th or 3rd.

Now.
Customize your set of tokens so that for each token you have five versions, each with a different border coded to represent their height level. It could be a number over the border, or a color, or whatever the fuck else.

Use them on a grid with spaces large enough to accomodate several tokens in the same space (representing tokens on different levels).

Profit.

>mfw the captcha is airplanes

>>50347188
Use different maps for the different fields. Probably up to 3 at most and possibly find some way to overlay them quickly for the players (sorry, not at home in roll20/maptools).

This also lets you put like, floating rocks and shit down.

Then switch as part of move like >>50347188

>>50347027
You do realize that there are a lot of RPG systems which don't model combat on a strict grid, and so there is no need to get down into the nitty-gritty of just how much altitude one character has over another? Also, if your characters are capable of suspending themselves in the air and moving in any direction - essential to meaningfully "flank" an opponent like they would in a typical D&D situation - then the only thing which really matters is how close they are, not what their exact X Y Z coordinates are in space.

>>50347313
You do realize that the OP specified
>Also suppose that I have a deep and abiding love for two-dimensional-grid-based combat ala D&D 4e, complete with flanking and with occupied squares blocking enemies' movement.
, right?

>>50347027
Make it 2D but with height being one of the dimensions. Like a side-scroller.

>>50347277
Sounds like a pain in the damn ass to keep track of.

>>50347510
Not solving anything.

Just steal 5e's advantage mechanics and give disadvantage from below and advantage from above.

>>50347748
OP wants a system to play tactical skirmish on a 2D grid that is viable on an online simulator.

That's not a simple request at all.

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>>50347027
I think you can still buy 3D tic-tac-toe sets

Buy those and use them as your battle grid

>>50348079
OP needs to do it online, but yeah, that's my suggestion as well. Use multiple maps, find some way to overlay them.

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>>50347027
Just go with the assumption that there's a hard limit to how high anyone can fly (they can exceed it, but only briefly), and everyone evens out to roughly the same height from round to round.

To represent diving and soaring, give special bonuses if a flying character moves at half speed:
>Move through enemy squares
>Make feint attempts faster
>Ignore penalty for charging at flying targets
etc.

I'd say having a 3d map and 2d map would be the way to do it using only the virtual tabletop that keeps with the criteria and spirit of OP's request. Have a top down map that doesn't show height, and a sidescroller map that doesn't show depth. Keep height/depth tokens as necessary and compare the maps.

The other way that works is to have high, medium and low tokens on a 3d map and just use some sort of rule that keeps discrete player tiles, 'higher goomba stomps lower and puses them to a random adjacent tile' or whatever. However, I don't know if that would work well for OP.

My only other idea is to get the players onto a game with full 3d movement together and use that for tokens. However, I know full well even /tg/ isn't autistic enough to think that trying to use Dragonball Xenoverse or whatever as a character token engine is a good idea.

>>50348299
This is actually pretty good. 2.5 D - you all usually hover at the same height, and going too high up exerts you too much.

You could put in a simple "high", "normal height" and "grounded" if you really want, but all you need to know is "normally people aren't on the ground but flying at the same height"

>>50348299
Yeah, but what's stopping two people from taking the same "space" on the grid at different heights anyway?

What if one player really, REALLY wants to do it?

>>50349069
Are we talking D&D? Because creatures normally have a 5ft space and take up only a small portion of that.

Yes, a 5ft cube has more than enough room for multiple creatures, but in combat this is a zone of control - the creature is constantly moving around within it, and can stop others from entering.

That said, you *can* share another creature's space (it just provokes an AoO when you enter or leave), and you need to in order to perform certain attacks such as grappling, or to make any kind of attack if you're Tiny or smaller.

tl;dr - in D&D that's already covered by the rules

>>50349335
Same space on X and Y axes, different space on Z axis for height.

How would you do that without token stacking?

GURPS has literally everything you just mentioned, in the Basic Set no less.

>>50349667
Really? How does it avoid token stacking?

>>50347027
DnD 3.5.

>>50347027

3D, but only three layers: "above", "middle", and "below" i.e ground level.

>>50349623
Take a square board, make holes in squares, put sticks of different length in the holes.

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>>50347087
Nice save anon, we totally bought that excuse!


now go masturbate to pic of little monster girls somewhere else

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>>50347027
This is how I'd do it in r20. if you weren't going to want to bother doing it fancy. Took less than 5 minutes to set up and very easy to check where people are vertically on the left, so you can assign penalties/etc. And that's ignoring that you have a whole array of markers you can activate on the tokens - you could color code the levels so the tokens show it, too (red for low, green for mid, etc). Heck, you could even arrange them directly above or below the people they actually are.

Obviously you've already figured out the mechanical advantages/disadvantages for movement and placement, so the only other thing it seems you're concerned about is token stacking on a square...which isn't really a problem in r20 because you can layer them as you like on the square- unless you just lividly can't stand the temporary ugly look. But that's a personal problem, honestly.

>>50351894
But what happens when tokens share the same X and Y coordinates and have to be stacked?

>>50351894
>you can layer them as you like on the square

This is a problem with circular tokens with the same dimensions.