As a game master, I default to theater of the mind, but most of the other players like to see maps, especially during combat. We compromise by me only going to the battle mat if the fight’s going to be long or complicated. I don’t have a big collection of figures. I do have a bunch of glass beads of difference colors, which are fine for monsters. I wanted a solution for individual PCs that wasn’t going to cost a bunch of money. I tried using binder clips with a strip of paper inside with the PC name. They were unstable. My new solution is a wooden token with a picture glued to one side.
I bought a bag of wooden tokens on Amazon. They are 1″ across and 1/8″ thick. About $10 for 120 of them.
I also bought a hole punch that makes 1″ holes in paper. It’s a supersized version of the tool you’d use in school. It cost about $11.
When you flip it over, you can see through a window of what you’re about to cut out. That means you can cut out a disc of paper exactly around some picture you want to glue to the wooden token.
I looked over my drawings I make for my game log. I have faces for just about every active PC in the game. So, I put 1″ circles in an image in GIMP and pasted in faces from drawings. I scaled them down and trimmed them into a disc shape. Then, I printed out the whole sheet and started stamping out the discs.
The punch tool will reach a couple of inches into a sheet of paper, so I did the first row, then cut that line off the sheet so I could get to the second row. Finally, I glued each little disc of paper to a wooden token. That took about an hour for about 20 of them.
The paper was a tiny bit bigger than the wood. I solved this with a quick pass with sandpaper that shredded off the extra. I used a glue stick, the kind that’s “disappearing purple”.