One thing I very much liked when watching people play 4E with virtual tabletops is that you could add status markers to tokens to keep track of who was currently marked, or poisoned, or prone, or whatever. In my pen & paper game with miniatures that is something which I hadn't solved well yet, with the risk of players and me forgetting who is suffering or profiting from what status effect. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I was considering using washers to mark status effects. But now I came up with something better.

A friend of mine is building figurines and models of just about everything, and he lent me his OLFA compass circle cutter. So I used PowerPoint to draw circles with curved writing on the edge stating what the status effect was, like "Marked", "Quarry", "Damage", or "Bonus", on circles of different colors. I printed that on 210 g/m² cardboard with my color laser printer. And then I used the circle cutter to first cut out the whole circle, and then a smaller inner circle with the same center. Thus I ended up with colored rings imprinted with various status effects. Lightweight and easy to transport I can use these rings to hang around the neck of the miniatures we are playing with, so nobody will forget what status is on which character or monster.

By the way, circle cutters are also used in scrapbooking, so if you have family that is into that hobby and hasn't gone digital yet, you might have a circle cutter in the house.