4th & Dragon : Dungeons and Dragons...and stuff

They make magnetic dry erase boards, though they tend to be expensive to buy from someplace like Staples and you’d still need to put your own grid on them.

Here’s one from Amazon.com

A cheaper bet is probably to find someplace that sells sheet metal (or apply a magnetic primer to something cheaper) and then to paint it with dry erase paint.

Another option (to the dry erase paint) is this Dry Erase Skin.  It’s clear and comes with an adhesive back, so if your substrate already has a grid on it, the grid will show through.  Or you could get them to print the grid for you for a bit more money.

A follow-up note:

I mentioned that I might use cereal box material as a basis for tokens to save on weight and cost.  Well, I tried that last night and it turns out that said material is too thick for the punches to cut through.  I ended up having to cut them out with regular scissors.  As a result, I might switch to the washers that have already been found to work well, or experiment with other kinds of materials.

Good to know about the cereal box material.  I appreciate you coming back and telling us your findings BP.  I need to get one of these punchers and see what other kinds of materials that are sturdy and able to cut through.  If I can track down a F2F group here at college I might need useful information like this

Just wanted to direct people to a useful website for washers: Fastenal.com

I just ordered 1”, 2”, 3”, 4”, and even 5” outer diameter washers (only 1 or 2 of the really big ones, mostly because I just want to see washers that big).  That’s monster sizes from small to colossal!  Smaller sizes are also available if you need to be making tokens for tiny or smaller creatures.  The prices are incredibly reasonable (just over 3 cents a piece for the 1” washers), and they’ll ship to your door or allow you to pick up locally (save money).  Despite the closest branch being within half-an-hour of my place, I’m getting them to ship me the washers I ordered for the sake of convenience.

Unfortunately they don’t have a 6” outer diameter washer.  That would be the right size for the Colossal Red Dragon that opened the Icons line (and whose picture I was kind of looking forward to putting on a washer).  However, since they did away with colossal as an official size in 4e, I think I can live without a 6” washer.  I bet my PCs will still tremble in fear of the 5” washer.

In any event, I’ll let people know when the washers arrive or if I have any difficulties with the order.

That’s a good resource.
Time to find a 5” hole punch!!! 

My games are running awesome using counters. 

No minis for me I think.  Ever.  Although I did buy some to try out the minis game.  It’s fun… But I am not using them at the table for RPG…

I’m a huge fan of counters too - but took a different approach.
Rather than each monster, I went with six symbols:

Bow & Arrow for Artillery
Sword for Soldier
Spiked Club for Brute
Paw Print for Controller / Leader / Skirmisher (I’ll separate these later)
Spider for Lurker
Shield for Minions

Then I made my own stamps in relief. (I’m a bit of a ceramics guru. Yes, I could make my own miniatures, but I like counters better.) I use the cheap, 12 packs of multicolored playdough for my counters. Make ball of a color, stamp, play. Bloodied guys get ‘pinched’. Dead guys get re-balled. The larger the character, the more playdough used. And having lots of colors works really well to diffrientiate amongst the fray.

Mixing up some colors also allowed me to gets some grunge going. If anyone were to try symbol stamping, I recommend some mixing. Hot pink goblins the first game got some laughs. Now everything is that putrid mix of brown, green, and gray that I know and love.

^ Nice idea there.  Really makes it versatile and you don’t have to make a lot or have many materials.  This site surprises me with some good idea I have never though of most every day

Well, I’ve finally gotten a completed order from Fastenal.com.  It took over a month to ship because one of the washers (the largest, I think) had to be special ordered and the company was very bad about communicating this to me (it took an irate email threatening to cancel my order before I got a response that let me know what was going on).  Also, the original order was short 11 of the 1” washers, but had a couple of extra 2” and 1 extra 3” washer, a probable result of them dealing with quantity on a by weight basis rather than actually counting.  They were very good, however, about fixing the short and said I could keep the extras.  Clearly they’re used to supplying contractors who could care less about a couple of washers here or there since their ordering in 100’s or even 1000’s usually.  Given the price, and the avaialbility of such unusually large sizes, my recommendation is that orders of the more common sizes (1” and 2") be seperated from orders of the larger, uncommon sizes (3” and above) and that you allow plenty of lead time when ordering the larger sizes.

Furthermore, the larger sizes (3” and above) are clearly thought of as machine parts as they came with a grease residue on them that I had to wash off.  Not exactly a hard thing to do, but it was unexpected.

The washers themselves, however, are great.  I’ve attached photos.  The first is a stack of each washer size from the 1” on top to the 5” on bottom.  The second gives you a better feel for the size of the 5”.  That’s a 2” washer inside the 5” washer and there are 5 1” washers across the bottom (the slight fisheye look is the result of using a web cam at closer than the recommended distance).  I can’t wait for my players to reach a level where I can put that 5” washer into play.

On another note, I’m going to be experimenting with various finishes for the completed tokens in an attempt to make them dry erase friendly (i.e. you can write on them with dry erase markers and erase it later).  Any one have any suggestions for what might work?