Back Story
I’ve been playing TTRPGs (specifically D&D 5e) for quite a while now, both as a player and as a DM, and combat naturally is a large part of those games, up until recently all combat I have ever played has been “theatre of the mind” and while there is nothing wrong with that (in fact in certain cases it is likely superior) I had always wanted to do tactical combat on a battle map, however as I spent many of my early D&D playing years as a teenager with no disposable income – the cost for minis and maps was just too much to justify when I would often only play a few sessions a year. What is to follow is the journey of learning to make cheap paper minis (about $0.12 AUD per mini), some workflows and materials I have tried and would recommend, and some places to find resources, all things I wish I had known about back then.
How it started
The idea to print out my own minis first came from seeing it on a YouTube video by “power word spill” on YouTube and I started out creating minis exactly as he recommended, sourcing art from the website printable heroes, printing and cutting, and using binder clips as a cheap and effective base. I found a bulk packet of binder clips on amazon and also found some relatively cheap card stock as I wanted to make sure the minis did not feel flimsy – regular printer paper was not quite going to cut it.
My first test
As you can see the results were decent, however the print quality (which I later found out was my printer running low on ink) left something to be desired, but the concept was there.
At this stage I want to point out that I did do one thing differently to the defined method for making these minis, I used my die cutting machine to cut the mini rather than a craft knife, I left this out earlier as I do not want anyone reading to think they need a die cutting machine to create these minis – a craft knife and a little patience will absolutely do it! I just already had a machine for other craft projects and wanted to get some extra use out of it. The process of making these on the machine was easy, I just opened the PDF from printable heroes in photoshop (you could do this for free in a program like krita), and isolated the image I wanted to print and cut.
But what about custom minis?
this was all a great start, but what about minis we wanted to play with that did not have preexisting printable mini sheets just laying around on the internet, such as our own player characters or custom NPCs, or the DMs custom creatures? Well this is where a little more photoshop (or in this case affinity designer) came into play.
Be it hand drawn, rendered, or something found on the internet, I needed to find a way to get any image ready to be printed and cut using the same method we had established for the art from printable heroes, to do this I started by isolating the art from the background in photoshop (ideally you start with some art without a background, but that is not always the case)
With the background isolated, it became a simple matter of using photoshop to generate an outline, adding a black semicircle as a guide for the base, then duplicating and flipping everything. I now had a printable mini.
^ My character “Jacklyn” created in hero forge, screenshotted, background isolated in photoshop, and the final ready for print and cut version.
The Dry Erase Minis
This is an idea I was very proud of, I took some generic character art and isolated it’s silhouette making it white, I then gave it the same ready to print treatment that I gave all the minis before this, however before folding them I covered them in some clear adhesive laminate, this left me with a handful of minis that the DM can use dry erase markers to quickly label on the fly for unexpected encounters.
Notes & Final Results
An important bit of wisdom shared by power word spill in his YouTube video is that you are better of making minis as you need them, rather than creating a bunch of minis that you may or may not end up needing in the future.
my personal advice to anyone wanting to try these out would be to create the following before your first session playing with minis:
- A copy of each NPC that could end up in combat THIS SESSION (no need to create NPCs your players will not meet, or ones that will never be in a fight).
- a handful of generic “bad guys” from your campaign setting, when in doubt, a few goblins and a few kobolds are a good place to start.
- a mini for each player character (if you can get some assorted ones, I recommend using binder clips of a different colour for player characters, it can really help speed up combat).
- a handful of blank minis for improvised encounters.
