In my post yesterday about paper minis, I held off on talking about how I was thinking of mounting my minis onto bases – partly because the post had been pretty long already, but mostly because I didn’t yet have all the parts I was planning to use to work toward a good solution.
I expected to do some experimentation with a couple of different ideas. My goal was to come up with some non-permanent bases that could be attached and detached as needed. This way, not only can the minis themselves be stored in a flat and compact fashion, but I only need enough bases to cover what might be active on the map at any given time. As it turned out, the extremely complex, crafty, and high-tech solution I found on the first try was:
Yes, through the magic of a small assortment of binder clips, I can now achieve paper-mini nirvana. Clip ’em on, then squeeze and remove the little handles from the clip.
Having now seen the blockiness of the non-trimmed minis, I’m considering trimming around them a bit, but I’ll try to do so in such a way as to not leave a lot of easily-damaged narrow limbs or weapon parts.
The main down side to this method is that it’s difficult to open the clips without the handles attached, so there’s potentially a small amount of game-pausing labor involved in switching bases around. I usually have a pretty good idea at the start of a session what the players will be encountering, though, so I can prepare most of the necessary minis in advance.
I bought a couple of little bags of assorted-size flat wooden discs with a plan to try attaching them to the underside of the binder clips to make them more stable, but the bases on the clips seem to be sufficient. I may still put discs under some of the big clips just to have a better visual guide to which map squares the figure occupies, but I’ll decide on that after getting a little playtime in.
So having printed minis for every single creature I’m likely to need to represent for the Phandelver story, it all fits into a little storage container room to spare.
