How (and why) I developed the initiative trackers for my Dungeon Master’s Combat Toolkit.

The Idea

This story starts with Dungeons & Dragons.

I started playing Dungeons & Dragons (shortened to simply D&D in the rest of this article) in 2017. At the time, I’d never played a tabletop RPG before, though I was familiar with wargames like Warhammer, and familiar with the setting, having actually read quite a few of the Dragonlance and Forgotten Realms books as I grew up.

My first D&D campaign was led by an experienced Dungeon Master (for anyone not familiar with D&D, think of this as someone who oversees and guides the campaign, presenting the setting, establishing the story and controlling the monsters, working with the players to tell an interactive story, rather than working actively against them). One of the players also had some experience playing D&D, the rest of us were complete novices.

D&D tends to be a mix of roleplaying and combat. When combat occurs, the players and the monsters controlled by the Dungeon Master (shortened to simply DM in the rest of this article) take turns to perform actions such as moving and attacking, and the order in which these turns occur is defined by an initiative order that is set at the start of combat. I won’t go into the detail of how initiative is determined, but suffice to say it results in a sequential list which determines which player / monster goes first, who goes next etc.

There are many ways to track initiative, the simplest being the DM writing the order down on a piece of paper that only they can see (the DM usually sits behind a card screen to allow them to hide things that the players shouldn’t see / know, such as maps and the DM's notes on the story). The problem with this first approach to tracking initiative is that the players can’t see the initiative order, so often have to rely on the DM to tell them when their turn is, or have to keep asking the DM.

An approach which allows both the DM and the players to see the initiative order makes things a lot easier, and one of the most straightforward is based on using a folded piece of paper for each player / monster, which sits along the top of the DM’s screen. Each piece of paper contains some key information (such as the player or character's name and usually in D&D their armour class as this is important in combat), and that information is written on both sides of the fold, so the players can see it from one side of the screen and the DM can see it from the other. The order of the pieces of paper along the DM screen represent the initiative order (from left to right = first to last or vice versa).

The DM of my first campaign used the folded paper approach and it worked great, until the day he misplaced them and then decided to proceed without recreating them - the result of the next combat encounter was chaos and in fact it almost resulted in a number of the player’s characters dying as a result.

I’d gotten into 3D printing and had just started to develop my own designs for 3D printing. I realised that what we needed was 3D printed initiative trackers - it’d be quite hard to misplace these.

Designing 3D Printable Initiative Trackers

When I first started creating my own 3D models, I started in Tinkercad (www.tinkercad.com), a free online 3D modelling tool.

Tinkercad is great for beginners and is fairly simple and easy to use for basic geometric designs. Tinkercad primarily allows the creation of 3D models via the addition and subtraction of primitive shapes e.g. add a cube, combine it with a cylinder, subtract a sphere from this combined shape etc.

I had three requirements for my design:

The initiative trackers needed to hold three pieces of information (the player’s name, their character’s name and their character’s armour class)
The initiative trackers needed to be double-sided and slot over a DM screen
The initiative trackers needed to print easily without supports

At the time the only way I could think to meet these requirements involved magnets. I designed the initiative trackers in two identical halves, which connected together via magnets. Each half could be printed without supports and when combined they would slot over the DM screen.

I didn’t want the initiative trackers to be too large / too heavy, considering they had to sit on a card screen, and were replacing folded pieces of paper, but I also needed magnets large and strong enough to hold the two halves together. In the end, I used 3 mm diameter Neodymium magnets, which then dictated that the minimum thickness of the initiative trackers had to be 5 mm.

For reusability, each half of the initiative tracker allowed a piece of paper or card to be inserted, on which the relevant information could be written (and by using magnets rather than glue, it was easy to split the two halves apart and change the inserted pieces of card).

Unfortunately, the only method I could come up with to hold the card in place without supports being required involved small triangular sections on the corners, which made use of bridging rather than supports to allow the card inserts to be bent slightly and slotted between the small triangular sections and the front of the initiative trackers. In reality, this wasn’t an ideal solution.

As I developed the initiative trackers, I also added the ability for them to hold an icon which would work in conjunction with some creature tokens I wanted to develop (combat in D&D can be represented a number of ways, such as by drawing maps on paper, or with miniatures on a grid, and I wanted a more generic / reusable solution to 3D printing different miniatures for each campaign).

From Magnets to Hinges, Tinkercad to Blender

At the end of last year, my friends and I wrapped up the campaign we’d been playing for the last two years. I had gained enough experience as a player to take the role the Dungeon Master for this campaign and we made use of my initiative trackers (and creature tokens) for the entire campaign (even when we had to move the campaign from in-person to virtual as a result of the global pandemic, I continued to use my initiative trackers next to my computer even if the players couldn’t see them).

Overall, they worked really well. They were sturdy and had survived two years of use with no significant problems (nothing got damaged or fell apart). The only real issue was the card inserts. The small triangular sections on the corners of the initiative trackers held the card inserts in, but only just, and even then, I had to use additional pieces of card to help them stay in.

Also, at the end of last year I decided to try and turn my hobbies into a career, so left full-time employment in the web industry to work on creating and selling my own 3D designs. I realised there was potentially a market for my initiative trackers and the creature tokens, so the idea of the Dungeon Master’s Combat Toolkit was born.

My 3D modelling skills had improved since I first started working with Tinkercad and I had switched to using Blender for all of my designs, so I was much more confident in developing more complex designs. There’s a steep learning curve with Blender, but it allows for a lot more precision and complexity than Tinkercad as you have control over individual vertices rather than being limited to working with primitive shapes. As a side note, I actually use the Bforartists (www.bforartists.de) variant of Blender, as if find the improvements to the UI make it a lot easier to use than the base version of Blender)

The card inserts were solved with the addition of a back plate to hold them in. I removed the small triangular sections on the corners of the initiative trackers and replaced them with a groove which the back plate would slot into. The slot is angled so it prints without supports, and the angle also then stops the back plate from falling out.

A pair of small indents was added to the open end of the groove, and a matching pair of nubs added to the back plate to allow the back plate to “snap” into plate and not slide out. There was a lot of trial and error, making micrometre adjustments to the indents and nubs to get a fit that wasn’t so loose the back plate rattled or fell out, but which also wasn’t so tight the back plate was impossible to remove without significant force.

I reduced the number of magnets required by introducing a print-in-place hinge, which are a design feature than can only be achieved as far as I’m aware, with 3D printers.

Instead of two separate halves, the initiative trackers are now single models that print flat, and once printed can be folded via the hinge (which then still allows the trackers to be unfolded to access the back plates for easy replacement of the card inserts). The single model actually consists of two parts, with a small gap between them at the hinge, that once printed can’t be separated.

I’d seen print-in-place hinges on the internet, but I’d never designed or printed one before. I took inspiration from various designs (found via a quick Google search), but couldn’t just reuse an existing design due to the orientation of the initiative trackers on the print bed (which was necessary to avoid supports on the underside). It’s a lot easier to design and print a print-in-place hinge if it can be printed flush with the print bed, or if the side of the hinge facing downwards can be printed angular rather than curved - it avoids a lot of quality issues as a result of overhangs.

In addition to the initiative trackers and the creature tokens, during the campaign I realised that spell templates would also be really useful (I was often asked if a particular spell could be cast in such a spot / direction as to hit all of the monsters without hitting any of the players, and often the answer involved approximation via hand gestures, which wasn’t ideal), so I also developed a set of these to add to the Dungeon Master’s Combat Toolkit.

The Kickstarter

And that brings me to the Kickstarter.

Once I’d developed the designs for the Dungeon Master’s Combat Toolkit., it was just a case of creating the 3D renders, creating a video to showcase the moving elements and launch the Kickstarter (which is actually all a lot more effort than it sounds, especially for someone who might be good a 3D design, but less so at 2D design).

The Kickstarter has now ended, but late pledges are now available via MyMiniFactory:

https://www.myminifactory.com/campaigns/dungeon-master-s-combat-toolkit-324

Arctanis Games