In my first DIY article about how I’m creating tokens for my campaign, I mentioned a row of small weapon icons printed on my token sheet and promised to explain them later:
In Chapter 1, my players faced groups of semi-zombified humans who carried a smattering of weapons among them. I wanted them to be intelligent enough that when one of the armed enemies fell, an unarmed one would obtain the fallen one’s weapon(s) and use them, so I wanted a way to track who was carrying what.
The weapon icons were created with TokenTool and printed at 1/4″ size. I cut out the printed weapon strip as a single piece (i.e. not clipping out the individual tokens yet) and sliced off a piece of magnetic strip of an appropriate size. The resulting token-strip was too strong for a paper hole punch, but fortunately I had a heavier-duty punch tool out in the garage that was able to do the job.
The result was a collection of handy little symbols that would magnetically adhere to the metal-washer-based token of whoever was holding them, making it easy to identify who was armed with what and to move weapons between characters (and in fact a player character picked one up and proceeded to use it).
So far I’ve only used this mechanism once; it did work out well, but since then my henchmen have been more uniformly equipped so I haven’t felt it necessary. Had I a) known at the time how seldom I’d use it and b) not already owned the $20ish hole punch set, in retrospect I probably wouldn’t have bothered. But I still have lots of magnet strips left, so I wouldn’t be surprised if I use it again at some point.