You’ve Been Pawned — Now With a Snazzy New Look

whitebeard Leave a comment

I like standees a lot. Enough to build a tool to make printing them easier. Apparently enough to spend a chunk of my spare time rebuilding that tool from scratch. Here’s version two.

What’s new

The biggest visible change is the carousel. In v1 you’d upload an image, see a flat preview, and squint at it trying to imagine the finished standee. Now each pawn is displayed as a rendered standee card — coloured plastic base included — in a coverflow-style carousel. You can flick between pawns, see side stacks peering in from the edges, and actually get a sense of what you’re making before you commit to printing it.

The You've Been Pawned interface showing a coverflow carousel with three fantasy character standees, each mounted on a coloured plastic base. A print preview and controls for page size, pawn height, and pawn width are visible on the right.

The second change is PDF export. The old version relied on overly clever print stylesheet monkeying to hide the UI when you printed the page, which was confusing. V2 generates a proper downloadable PDF with dashed cut guides laid out and ready to go. It’s an extra step, but it’s the step you’d expect.

There are a handful of smaller additions too: a Pawn Width control (Narrow / Normal / Wide) alongside the existing size options, and you can now drop images anywhere on the page rather than hunting for a specific drop zone.

A generated PDF open in macOS Preview, showing a full page of standees laid out in a grid with dashed cut guides between them.

I hope you enjoy using it and it saves you some precious GM time.

A note on how it was built

V2 was put together almost entirely with Claude Code. I went into it optimistic but genuinely unsure — AI-assisted coding has had a lot of hype and I’ve learned to be sceptical of hype. But it was a remarkably smooth process. The chat window kept me oriented through what was a fairly large update, and I ended up changing almost no code by hand. Make of that what you will. I’m choosing to take it as good news, while quietly accepting that roughly 95% of my accumulated skills may now be worthless.

Give it a try. It’s free — there’s a Ko-fi link in the footer if you want to say thanks. And if you find it useful, pass it on to your GM or share it on your socials.

If you use it, I’d love to know how the PDF output holds up — particularly whether it prints correctly on A4 and US Letter. And if something’s broken on mobile, that’s on the list for v3, along with an AI image generation feature that I’m excited about. More on that when it exists.

Six months on startplaying.games

whitebeard 1 Comment

At the beginning of this year, I started to take GMing on startplaying.games seriously, scheduling games for every weekday and trying to run all I can.

I’ve just zoomed past 50 paid games and it’s about time that I dug into the numbers and did some calculations. It has taken me 6 months to get to 50 paid games, but at my current run rate I would reach 100 paid games in another 11 weeks – which is progress!

My Profile over on SPG

All told, I’ve been paid out $1750 for those 50 games. That averages $35 a game. I’m pleased with that – I usually charge $15-$20 a seat and I do discount if players say they can’t make the full amount but want to stay in the campaign. I don’t get the full ticket price – startplaying take a cut and on top of my seat charges, there’s a booking fee charged to the players.

The past few weeks, that average has been ticking higher and that makes me feel optimistic that it’ll continue.

Now, a game is around 3 and a half hour’s game-time with perhaps another 45 minutes prep time.

So that means I’m working (if you can call it that) for something like $8-$10 an hour. Hardly a living wage. I do have one table that regularly fields 5 players and at that point, it makes much more sense. It is really a way to make pocket-money at the minute rather than a living. It’s a little bit better than I get at the Box Room Café in Cambridge – although I do get a very tasty free plate of cheesy chips for GMing there.

The prep-time is coming down as I’m getting used to the adventures I’m running but I’ve noticed recently that as I run more games in a week I need to spend a bit longer refreshing myself on what happened in the last session. Having said that, my competency as a GM has grown massively and I think I could get away with less prep work than I typically do.

I would really hate to give the impression that I’ve turned up unprepared though – I’ve been in a few games online where the GM seemed to be winging it from start to finish and it showed badly and I didn’t carry on. But, that said, I’ve got much better at winging it too though with a lot of preparation in the background – I think that’s to the players’ benefit because they really can do what they want and I’ll figure out a way to support it. There have been a couple of sessions recently where I thought “wow, I really do know what I’m doing now!”

I wrote about my initial impressions of startplaying a little while ago and my criticisms still stand – I am in the dark as to either what is making people join or not join my games. I would really welcome just a bit more analytics data from them so I can test and tweak accordingly. I also wonder if they’re really doing the best job they can marketing to players outside the US – some examples of locale blindness include defaulting to showing games at peak US times and bloody mm/dd/yyyy date input fields.

As for expenses – I have a few. I pay for an upgraded discord server, owlbear rodeo vtt and a chunk to dndbeyond.com for adventures and source books. These add up to maybe $300 over the last six months.

It’s not much more than a hobby for me and I’m lucky to be able to do it between childcare duties. I’m not sure how to make it pay better – perhaps I need to schedule at US- and insomniac-friendly times, maybe even raise my base prices. I have very little information to go on to make these decisions well.

I would love to be able to turn this into a full-time gig – I suspect I need to learn a bit more about marketing and figure out some scalable ways to do that. But, I’ve enjoyed this six months and am going to stick with it for the immediate future. You can join one of my games here: https://startplaying.games/gm/whitebeard

An online tool to make playable paper pawns

whitebeard 1 Comment

I’m always in a rush before my in-person D&D games. Draw the maps on the whiteboard, refresh myself on the adventure, sharpen my pencils, pack the bag, set off on the bike. One of the most time-consuming bits has been finding miniatures or making standees for the players and enemies. All the worse because it involves casting strange incantations over the printer to get it to work.

Too often, I’ve resorted to using blank plastic standees that I can write on with a whiteboard marker – usually with the initials of the monster or bad guy. But the players just don’t gasp in the same way when you plonk down a white bit of plastic with an O on it. Much better to surprise them with something that looks the part.

That’s why I’ve made You’ve been Pawned – a simple tool that you can throw a bunch of images at and will reliably produce a page of standees to print. It should work in most Desktop browsers – if not let me know and I’ll try to fix. I find it really easy to get Bing Images (or other friendly AI) to make a few fun characters and to drop them into this tool. With a bit of help from the laminator and some scissors, I can make a whole session’s worth of characters in one go.

I use some of these whiteboard friendly blank game board markers from Amazon to hold up my standees. I think they work pretty well, and I particularly like that there are plenty of colours so I can throw a bunch of Orcs on the table and not get confused between them.

It’s also the first real bit of programming I’ve done for a while. Elm is my go-to language for making this kind of browser tool – something built primarily to work for me, but that other people might find useful. I find something playful about the language/architecture – it lets me get experimenting on the important bit of the problem right away, knowing that in the future I can lean on the type system to help me reorganise the code safely. And I find reactor-type code much easier to deal with than async/await code in javascript. In this case, the tricky bit for me was getting the CSS transforms for the offset and scaling of the images correct.

Let me know if you find You’ve been Pawned useful. If you have a particular feature you’d like that will make your life easier without making the tool too complex, drop me a line and I’ll see what I can do.