Using standup pawns to play tabletop RPGs using Rising World as the set.

This is a unique application of Rising World, those of you who play tabletop RPGs know how difficult it is to buy 3D minis and terrain to create an immersive experience. There are a few 3D virtual tabletops out there but none of them can compare to the voxel building/terraforming of Rising World. The problem with Rising World is that there is a very limited number of 3D mobs that have been implemented, and the GM cannot control them. The 3D virtual tabletops that do exist rarely animate their minis, maybe they support 3D print conversions - but there will always be deficit of 3D art especially animated and portable into a game engine without tremendous work costing time and money

The compromise solution is to use 2D counters and 2.5D pawns, same compromise you end up making on tabletop when you do not have the 3D mini you need, and turns out the digital art for these are a perfect fit for Rising Worlds Poster feature!

Simply use the poster item - upload an image (prefer transparent border formats like PNG) and place/resize it on the floor for a 2D counter and play a life size checkers board. For a 2.5D standup pawn simply rotate up of the floor on X axis and now you can play a life size chess board. Unlike 3D sprite games they will not face rotate - so the workaround is stamp down another copy rotated 90deg in Y

The mitflit on the right is looking at me that way - but you see double ears and double sword because of the double pawn at some angles, but most angles it appears they are face turning. I also made them too big that creature is half that size but I wanted to see how well the art scales. For scaling just turn on the game grid or use a grid aligned texture and eyeball it or calculate the as 5' per 3 grids, with 20" grids, 0.1 grids is 2". I presume for low bandwidth online play you would want low rez compressed images, not sure how well the game works for poster display to all players - though it presume it works just like any other texture?

It really increases immersion when you can see the scale of caverns vs. what the flat map would show - I have had real fun building a megadungeon - then started wondering could this actually be used as a play setting? Now when you see a dragon as tall as a castle - you might want to run away!

https://images.steamuserconten…%23000000&letterbox=false

Of course you fight with dice and math same as you would on tabletop, so have your dice and character sheet handy. And just like the real world the GM has to fly around and pick up the pawns and place them back down again if they move. I did not try other images yet - so I do not know if poster inventory is uniqued or is it just a placeholder selecting the last image used unless another is selected.

I personally get my pawn art from Paizo (they have a decades old back catalog for monster manuals and adventures) - while they have .PDF/.JPG there they also sell higher rez better compressed .WEBP with Foundry VTT (and presumably other VTT). I used GIMP to convert .WEBP to .PNG. But there are many other resources for art.

Quote from HomePoint

If your player uses the console command renderplayer the game will save a .png file of them with whatever clothing they are wearing.

My presumption is the players would use their actual 3D game avatar and stand in place and move on turn as if playing human chess, the benefit would be seeing the play area from their own POV at scale. Why would the GM want a .png of the players character? I guess the player could use it to copy/paste their picture to their character sheet? I supposed if players want more of a fantasy portrait than possible in the game, then they could just move their own poster around just like the GM is doing with NPC (presuming server permission allows poster placements) Then their actual game avatar dresses in black like a stagehand to know they are not part of play.

I think it is better than using physical terrain. With physical terrain you do not have what has been standard in isometric CRPGs to cut out the wall so you can actually see what is going on (well you could at the risk your build falling apart or being magnet/glued together making it a mess to even try). But even that is not as good as looking at the scene in first person view and going do I have line of sight to my target - with table top wargaming you resolve that with lines (lasers, pencils, rulers) because it is impossible to fit your fat head near your minis eyes.

The biggest problem I have though is torches are half the radius they should be - they dim/blackout at 10'/20'. D&D gets dim at 20' and blackout at 40' - you cannot see across the average room like the map and adventure designer assumed - so the maps are not playable as intended. But if that was changeable it would be fantastic as even a top-down virtual table top with dynamic lighting is not that immersive (I like shadowdark where torches are required as only mobs not players get darkvision)

After doing this I found that Fantasy Ground VTT (one I supported over a decade ago buying their entire library of D&D products only to cut my losses when I realized they was coasting on their laurels and never updating) finally levereged their 3D VTT kickstarter they bought out. What the showed did not fully release a beta capability to do standup 2D pawns on flat 2D maps (like you say this really is the only way to capture that old school table feel - maybe a 3D player minis with papercraft mobs and a printed map) Foundry VTT has both an isometric and 3D mod mode. And there are plenty of 3D VTT kickstarters that have come and gone, but like I said none of them even come close to what is possible with RW terrain/building.

The trick is to do minimal clutter - you are not making a video game. Since clutter is just blocks and you are already making a huge dungeon you do not want to fill your chunks with clutter and cause lag. But from a GM perspective you want to keep it like you would on tabletop - block in the walls add some scatter furniture to indicate the room purpose and have some tactics. Add the loot chest (someday when we can make inventory objects that is - till then track inventory on your paper sheet). Leave the rest for the minds eye so if someone says hey that chandelier that I think is on the ceiling do I see that the rope that happens to be next to me is anchoring it and I can cut it and kill the mob in just one action? You still want them to imagine that rope, you do not want to have to build that rope. You need to be able to say Yes And or No But with some imaginary details - and if you get too detailed in the game what they think they can see is limited by existant art. But if you need these details Poster Art is also a good fast way to get them in - especially if you use image AI to get on the fly descriptive art. Plenty of people make loot and npc art cards as well. I like Paizo as a publisher - even if you do not like Pathfinder 2e as a ruleset, they have a lot of maps and pawns and cards and you can get them as digital art (WOTC is horribly bad at accessory market though canceled 3D tabletop was going to go after that with predatory mobile gaming asset model)

In theory one could follow the lead of the API fantasy races plugin and do a similar thing but for your RPG ruleset of choice so that the character sheet is in the game rather than by your side or over on an alt-tab PDF. But keeping up with rules additions/errata occupies all the 2D VTT so much that it is only affordable with huge volunteer teams. Easier to just use the side sheet and not try to turn RW into an CRPG. Also there is license complications - am a huge fan of Solasta think it is better D&D than BG3 - but all their races, classes, mobs are homebrew as they did not have a license beyond the limited subset in the SRD

I am going to finish the dungeon first - half way there with blockin then I need to figure out doors and furnitures. Maybe by then they will add the poster autofacing so do not have to cross hatch the standups. I am learning that 2D cartographers and narrative authors fall victim to publishing cycles, it can be a puzzle to turn those maps and texts into a workable 3D mega dungeon. I am doing a mega dungeon under a keep in a swamp (faking that as there is no swamp biome) - flooded twice already afraid to take the dam walls down for the third time.

Renderworld can I have it give a underground dungeon layer floorplan or it it just gods eye map of surface - more detailed than game map? If it can do levels this would be really good for verifying layouts, right now I use three block cubes is 5' tiles then try to count using the F8 highlight. Often scratching my head where the heck I got offset so I have to set things aside and look at it with fresh eye. I do the floors first before wasting time on walls in a bad floorplan that misaligns. The biggest struggle is mapmakers do not 3D/ISO model themselves so often their stairs and multilevel drawings make no sense.

I do not like the idea of using RW NPCS as then you are using the videogame combat system rather than the RPG you are playing but could see using them as a frozen asset 3D art. This idea is to recreate tabletop with dungeon floorplans and walls, with the same pawns used on table top same TTRPG combat rules (be it SD/PF2e/D&D medieval fantasy RW could even do modern sets) The difference is players get a first person view rather than the gods eye view.

NPCs are fine for shopkeepers I think but I would rather be able to ghost into any NPC and act it out just in case anyone wants to barter or steal and up to shennigans. Maybe it just needs a GM character mirror to edit appearance with load/save/steal presets?

Will have to fiddle with asset loader, are these brought in as voxel conversions using building blocks blueprints or are they brought in as actual object meshes? Could see using that for player minis if there was a way to convert the 3D printer sites output but then the players become stagehands dressed in black moving their mini and lose the first person view idea a bit (and it gets crowded), and there is people out there that have done STLs for D&D monsters so maybe better for the BBEG.

I am barely 50% done with the megadungeon blocking, so have not actually tried to use the idea yet as I then have to add scatter furniture and doors (really need hinged blocks for traps - like the drawbridge but with blocks, for now I will use fake posters for secret doors or GM sledge hammer). Want the new version that implements facing posters for standup pawns as crossing them is a bit tedious and wierd looking.

Also torches are half what D&D says they should be and what IRL is (D&D is an average of torch radius for an hour a fresh torch goes further and burned down torch is less - youtubers have tested this). This makes maps unplayable as written because the designer assumes you can see across the room or the high ceiling if you have a torch (I like Shadowdark no PC darkvision, torch is mandatory). I have yet to find any way to increase torch radius (database has only torch intensity). Just finished a combat arena and it was supposed to have long torches under the viewing balconies lighting up the floor - and the torches did not reach the floor! Cannot put the torches on the floor as that needs to be free for combat and just putting them lower on the walls still has dark arena in middle.

My favorite CRPG in recent times is Solasta for close turn based adherence to D&D5e rules, but even that was not licensed and everything was homebrew and not the same as the books. The new version they are working on they promise a dungeon maker. If you watch any stream of BG3 multiplayer it really does not play like tabletop more like multiplayer videogame mayhem as it is more of a hybrid (and they dropped the idea of GM mode). There is a kickstarted indy studio working on a PF2e CRPG using minis that looks to have a good art style, but being indy they are not even yet thinking about a GM dungeon making mode and given the art style seems intended for gods eye view I doubt multiplayer will do FPV as they are focused on single player and vaguely mentioned multiplayer maybe if they have time and money. All of these have the same flaw - 3D modeling is hard so their monster availability is what they needed for the story, and none of them have the idea of importing 2D standup pawns.

I was actually suprised this was even possible in RW, as I thought posters was restricted to surfaces and on a whim I tried to rotate it and was dumbfounded it worked!