D&D General Do You Use Verticality in Your Games? How?

[Hexmage-EN]

I've been playing a lot of Baldur's Gate 3, and for my last session I run before I get swamped by schoolwork I want to incorporate a lot of verticality to the battle map, especially since one of my players runs a shadar-kai monk with the mobile feat.

I usually make my maps using removable adhesive to stick Dungeon Tiles to a piece of black posterboard, so this time I'm cutting up pieces of an older, beat-up posterboard to stack on top of one another before adhering the tiles on top. I've decided that each piece of posterboard beneath a tile results in an elevation increase of 5 feet. At present I've got some water directly on the main posterboard, then the surrounding shore at 5 feet, then stairs that elevate at a slope to a platform at 25 feet. What I've got looks fairly good so far, but I get the feeling I could have found an easier way to construct this.

 

[iserith]

Yes, I use it quite a lot since terrain affects tactics in an engaging way. In both in-person and online games, I just write +X ft. for the elevation on the map.

 

[Quickleaf]

I've used plastic combat tiers (described here) to great effect. I've also gotten creative adapting "sidescroller" poster maps.

 

[Istbor]

Either just marking down the difference in elevation, or if I feel fancy, dice boxes and coffee cans.

 

[el-remmen]

Dice boxes and their black plastic caps, in addition to just marking levels of height on the battle map in marker. I recently did a a couple of ships with removable layers/decks - not exactly height but same idea.

 

[Richards]

In my last 3.5 campaign, I had a player running an elven "bounder," a roguelike class I made up for him, since he wanted to play a PC capable of doing parkour, basically. So as he did a lot of running up walls and things in that campaign, I made sure to give him plenty of walls and things to run up.

Johnathan