Many players of table-top role-playing games (TTRPGs) like Dungeons & Dragons (DnD) like to create elaborative miniature scenes with painted pewter miniature figurines to represent heroes and monsters in battle. However, not everyone has the time and money to do this. My solution? Make my own miniature figurines out of paper.
The original idea came from The New Easy to Master Dungeons & Dragons game in the early 1990s. That game came with a large poster map of the dungeon, which was essentially a game board, and sheets of paper counters to represent the players’ characters and the monsters. My brother and I were fascinated with the paper counters… so fascinated that we experimented with creating our own.
Keep in mind that this was like 1992. Computers and printers weren’t up to par for making counters. I think we used index cards to make them. We would use a ruler and measure out the correct dimensions, then use a pencil and colored pencils to hand-draw the characters or monsters onto the card, cut them out, fold them, and tape them together with clear tape.
Fast-forward 30+ years, and now I’m running DnD “5e” games with my boys, ages 13 and 10 (I may yet get my wife and 15 year old daughter to play). We tried the virtual tabletop from DnD Beyond, but my kids prefer to do it the good old-fashioned way with a battlemap, dry erase markers, and paper counters.
I’ve got the paper counters down to an exact science now. I’m not sharing them yet, since the ones I’ve made so far use images to which I don’t have the rights. However, I would like to at least share how I make them in the near future. Maybe I can even use artificial intelligence to generate original images so I can share a few sets of creature counters.
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