In the spirit of Aul Grump, another poll.
Do you use paper minis or counters in your games.

I use almost entirely D&D minis (the plastic pre-painted ones). However, I have a large stash of paper counters from my pre-DDM days, and will occasionally use them.

I use them most for horses. They're great for horses, since you can put a mini on the horse to indicate that it's currently mounted, and move the mini off when it dismounts (and that has saved us A LOT of trouble over the past year or two, most certainly).

I'm a big fan of paper mini's and counters. I try to use metal and plastic when I can but I can't cover every genre and setting. I'd rather have an accurate representation on the table instead of a proxy.

Metal and plastic minis only, with a single one time exception to test out PCrafter - when I used 200 odd paper minis to do a siege using Castle Works (now Classic).

The Auld Grump, who makes a small income from painting minis into the bargain...

We use metal minis for the PC's (Reaper seems to be the mini of choice) and Dungeon and Dragon Miniatures for NPC's and foes. I used to put out Fiery Dragon's paper counters (sometimes called battle tabs, counters, etc), but since everyone invested in the DDM's, there was a small outcry when I tried to pull out my Fiery Dragon paper counters during the last week's game.

It appears we have been spoiled.

between myself and one of my players we have enough metal mini's to sink the bizmark. I have several cases, and h has a storage shed full. I can't recall the last tme I used penies that were painted with nailpolish numbers to represent enemies.


Most of my mini's are fited wtih magnets in the bases. (the tiny rare earth ones you can buy online, they are about 9 cents each, but can hold the figure to another one of the magnets een if shaken vigerously). I then paint all my hills with magnetic paint, which helps keep them from sliding down.... before flocking the hill.

Plastic /or/ Metal figures if I got them. If not its paper all the way.

I have a serious problem with subsitituting models to represent other models. Now, I don't mind for example:
Using a regular Orc to represent a Black Orc or Savage Orc. While yes it would be nice to have those specific models needed. I can live with that. But I cannot abide using an Orc or some other fantasy creature to represent say a villager, or king or some other random NPC. Therefore I try to keep a large variety of paper standees, flats, counters nearby for easy printing.

Up until my recent purchase of 2 boxes of plastic Zombies. I was fully prepared to print and assemble the dozens of paper standee Zombies for a Savage World campaign.

-Floyd

We vastly prefer to use the D&D plastics (or Star Wars for future) and Reaper (or Magnificent Egos, or whatever else looks cool) for our games.

But, we have used paper for some things like horses, or very, very large minis.

For example, we faced an enormous Scorpion, and needed a mini, quick! So...

Yeah, it seems like the market for paper standups is dwindling rapidly, with all these cheap plastics coming out. If you can get a heaping handful of varied minis for about a quarter each, why bother with paper?

While I prefer the look of 3D miniatures I don't have the time to paint them nor the inclination to spend the money for the variety that I want. I scan in my paper miniatures so they can be altered for variety or rescaled depending on how much area the tabletop needs to represent.

I bought a couple of WotC Star Wars miniatures sets but I couldn't customize my collection to match my needs (I despise their CCG approach to sets), they lack variety, and they seem to think that females in the Star Wars universe comprise less than 0.5% of the population -- no wonder they're always fighting!. (The latter is important -- well, its really more of an entertainment issue -- since I'm running a game for my son and his friends and two of the guys get distracted when "women" are a factor. So, the chief protagonist is a female agent and her main associate is a female privateer captain which tends to lead them to overlook a lot of things and makes it easy to mess with their little minds.)