How Two DMs Designed the Perfect D&D Initiative Tracker

Four years ago, Cacklin Slayers didn’t exist yet.

There was no webshop. No product line. No Combat Cubes. No Beast Deck. Just two coworkers in a bookstore restaurant during lunch break, talking about Dungeons & Dragons.

Marco worked behind the coffee bar. Josha worked in the travel and children’s book section. We had only recently discovered our shared love for D&D and had already started writing adventures together. Back then, we were publishing short adventures on DMs Guild called 3for5e: one-shots condensed into just three pages, plus maps and statblocks. Even then, we were obsessed with one question: how do you keep D&D fun, without all the unnecessary fluff?

Then one lunch break, Josha walked up to Marco with a simple question.

“You’ve got a 3D printer, right?”

That question changed everything.

The Problem Was Never Initiative

Josha had been thinking about combat. More specifically, initiative. Not initiative itself. That part works fine. Roll a d20, add your modifier, and you’re good to go. The problem was everything around it: the chaos, the sorting, the admin.

At the time, Marco tracked initiative with pen and paper. Sometimes in Excel, if he felt fancy. Excel was better because of one magical feature: sorting. Write down all the players, add monsters, enter initiative rolls, hit sort, done. That’s when we realized something important.

The problem wasn’t initiative itself. It was sorting initiative.

Five players. Four monsters. Tense roleplay gone wrong. Combat starts, and somehow the first thing the DM has to do is administrative work. It killed momentum before the first turn even began. That felt wrong.

The First Prototype

The first version of our Initiative Tracker was surprisingly close to what you see today. It was already 3D printed. It already used a numbered range. It already attached to a DM screen. And yes, it already used banners.

What it didn’t have was style.

No stone texture. No fantasy fonts. No raised details. No beautiful banners hanging from little poles. The first version wasn’t ugly, exactly. It was brutally functional. Pure efficiency. Zero flair. The only question that mattered was simple: does it solve the problem?

We also hand-cut every single whiteboard sticker ourselves. Every banner. Every piece. Every tracker. The first 30 units were a ridiculous amount of work.

The First Sign We Had Something Real

Toward the end of testing, we started talking to a local board game store in Rotterdam. They believed in the product almost immediately and invited us to sell it in their shop. That was the first moment we thought, “Wait… maybe we’re not crazy.”

Then came Etsy. We figured it would be fun to throw the tracker online. Best case? A few sales. Worst case? Nothing happens. A few months later, we were suddenly selling around two trackers a week.

That might not sound like much, but to us it felt magical.

People we had never met were buying something we designed during lunch breaks in a bookstore restaurant. Slowly, more stores started believing in the product too, including the bookstore where we worked ourselves. That was surreal.

The Breakthrough: Combat Cubes

The biggest breakthrough came later, and hands down, it was the Combat Cubes. That was the moment our Initiative Tracker stopped being just an initiative tool and became a full Combat Tracker. Suddenly, it wasn’t just about turn order anymore. It was about conditions, concentration, buffs, debuffs, summons, and everything else that slows combat down.

We spent ages debating how to handle conditions. Should we use written conditions like condition rings? Symbols? Icons? Something more visual? Eventually, we realized we were overthinking it. The solution had to be just as simple as the original tracker: whiteboard stickers.

That changed everything.

Funny enough, Marco had already designed small slots into the original banners for future expansion, even though we had no idea what that expansion would actually look like. Once the whiteboard solution clicked, production suddenly became much easier. The cube stickers were exactly half the size of banner stickers, which made everything simple to scale.

Simple won again.

Our Design Philosophy

Over the years, we’ve added new banners, GM banners, Combat Cubes, and other improvements. But one thing hasn’t changed. Every design decision comes back to that one question:

Does it make D&D faster, easier, and more fun?

That’s it.

We never wanted to redesign D&D or replace initiative with some elaborate homebrew system. We wanted to remove friction.

D&D is already a complex game. It has more than fifty years of rules, design, and iteration. Some groups follow RAW to the letter. Others play much looser. Most tables land somewhere in between. We wanted our products to work for all of them.

Our thinking was simple: if the strictest rule-lawyer at the table thinks our product is great, everyone else will probably be fine too. That’s why RAW has always mattered so much to us.

Everything Has to Earn Its Place

There’s one more design rule that matters deeply to us.

Every product has to earn its place on the table.

Most people play D&D at home, not in giant dedicated game rooms. Just around kitchen tables, dining tables, and coffee tables. Space matters. Table clutter matters. That means every physical product we design needs to justify its existence.

And honestly, this philosophy existed long before the Initiative Tracker. It was already there in our first adventures. The old 3for5e modules were our rebellious response to bloated one-shots full of thirty pages of lore nobody actually uses. We wanted to prove that a great four-hour adventure could fit in three pages if every sentence earned its place.

That mindset never left.

Whether it’s a product, an encounter, or an adventure, we always ask the same question: does this deserve to be here?

Final Thoughts

At the end of the day, we build for ourselves first. Not because we think we’re special, but because we are our own target audience. We’re DMs too. We deal with the same frustrations, make the same mistakes, and have plenty of bad habits at the table.

That’s exactly why Cacklin Slayers works.

If a product doesn’t solve our problems at the table, it probably won’t solve yours either. The Initiative Tracker started with one simple idea during a lunch break four years ago. Since then, it has grown into something much bigger. But the mission hasn’t changed.

Less chaos. More D&D.

That’s what we’re here for.

Continue Reading

Want to dive deeper into faster combat and better initiative tracking? These two blogs pair perfectly with this story:

Or, if you’re ready to speed up combat at your own table:

View the Initiative Tracker

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