Welcome back once again to Mayday, Miss Marcy! where we take your questions and provide you with the advice you need, whether you want to hear it or not! Last week we dealt with bringing your own Homebrew to game nights, jumping around from game to game, and the sometimes confusing world of hobby shorthand. This week, another batch of letters has landed on my desk, and I’ve called in a few friends to help with one of them.
Before we get started, as a reminder if you’d like your questions answered in this column, you’ve got two options: You can leave a comment down below once you’ve finished reading this week’s answers, or if you’re a Patron, we have a bot set up in our Discord that you can use to submit questions to there as well. I look forward to hearing from you!
Hobby Parenting Tips with Co-Stars Rob and Raf
Dear Miss Marcy,
I’m still many years from properly sharing my hobbies with my kids, but I’m starting to take my oldest (two) on short FLGS trips. Besides the obvious of not touching other people’s things and reasonable volume, what behaviors or experiences have you had with young children in gaming and hobby spaces that you wish to encourage? I’ve hosted sealed MTG drafts at home with friends, and I gave him some cards of his own to play with while we did our thing. It worked well as a distraction but I’m still teaching him to be gentle with the cards. Small steps!
I look forward to teaching him board and games and eventually miniatures, but want to make sure others are comfortable and having a good time too!
– Hopeful Heretek
Dear Hopeful,
I have to admit that the first thing I did when I saw your question was think about what an awesome parent you already sound like; the drafting and inclusion is such a great touch already. The second thing I did was recruit two Actual Dads, Rob and Raf, to help me out, because I’m what most would call Gay Coffee Aunt. So without further ado, here’s my co-stars this week:
Rob:
Dear Heretek,
I’m hopping in here to help Marcy out as a noted kid-haver in the hobby. I think it’s great to bring kids into the hobby, and over the last few years I’ve had a blast teaching my son to paint and bringing him to the local store and events. Here’s what I’d recommend:
Asking Permission:Â Moreso than just not touching models or cards, you want to teach your kids to ask permission to touch or see things. As a dad I just typically let kids touch my models, especially if they aren’t super fragile – the worst case is they break – but you want your kids to be in the habit of asking, and that doubles as a great way to teach them about consent and being polite, with “please,” and “thank you.”
Start with Small Doses: I find my son – even when he’s had his ADHD meds – tops out at about an hour of hobby time or gaming. Start with smaller and shorter experiences that won’t strain the limits of their patience and attention spans.
Bring Their Friends In:Â It’s great that you want to game with them. But if you want to keep them in the hobby or encourage them to be in it long term, get their friends involved. I run a semi-biweekly HeroQuest game for my son and two of his friends, plus another dad. It keeps them all involved and it’s a great way to get them to read and think strategically.
In terms of lessons, the biggest one is learning to wait for their turn and take turns. Being interested when the other players are operating and not just talking about how bored they are. Teaching them to share and work together is another good one – the kids in my HeroQuest sessions initially got very mad at each other for “stealing” their opportunities to search for treasure, when I had to keep explaining to them that they share a single pool of spoils. And yeah, you want to teach them to be careful with cards and miniatures. That’s one I’ve had to work on early and often with them. Sleeves and laminators are your best friends there because it doesn’t matter how many times you teach those lessons, they won’t learn them until well after they’ve ruined things!
Raf:Â
Hey Heretek,
I’m also a gaming dad; I’ve got three running around the house from the ages of 4 to 10. Like a lot of gaming parents I have the dream of raising a house full of gamers! It’s great to find something to share with your kids. Everything Rob said is great, and I don’t have too much to add for the kids so I’ll give some advice for you.
Realistic Expectations: Kids are kids. They love spending time with you, regardless of the activity. When I’m painting miniatures all my kids want to come help me paint my “monsters”, but so far any time I try to get them to paint their own they bounce off pretty quickly. It can be frustrating naturally, but embrace them spending time with you. Eventually it’ll rub off, or at least you’re more likely to have them gaming when they’re seven if they had fun experiences around games at three.
Everything Is a Toy: Along those lines, remember that games, with their rules and structures and turn taking, may not be your kids’ cup of tea. I have some fun memories of setting up terrain and some extra Space Marines and “playing” Kill Team with a four-year-old that mostly consisted of rolling dice (arbitrarily) and making pew pew noises and knocking Marines off the table. That’s good gaming time!
In the world of board games, check out everything made by HABA. They have board games for kids as young as two, and while they look a lot more like activity toys they start to lay groundwork. Here, Fishy Fishy and Monza were household favorites. If you like RPGs, Amazing Tales is again designed for kids. The label says as young as three, but I had more success between four and five.
And there you have it! Hope that helps, Heretek!
All Primed Up and Nowhere to Go
Miss Marcy,
Help! I’m looking at starting a new army soon, but I’m struggling with choosing a paint scheme for the army. I don’t want to do any of the major canon schemes for the army, but otherwise don’t know what I do want. What advice do you have for choosing a scheme for an army?
Signed, army-rich but idea-poor
Dear Army-rich,
One of the fun but frustrating parts of hobbying is that there often feels like there are “right” or “wrong” ways to paint an army. In a lot of ways this oddly carries over from some of the more historical aspects of the hobby, and in other cases from people who are so focused on accuracy (even fictional) that it tends to feel stifling even to those who are not so inherently tied to those things.
The other problem comes from the fact that many ‘official’ or ‘canonical’ schemes just utilize very complimentary color palettes and combinations, meaning that it sometimes feels hard to not want to use them since they’re already so clean and pleasing to look at (Say what you will about Ultramarines, for example, but their blue/white/gold/red schemes are extremely satisfying).
Sometimes unhelpful answers will be things like “just look at complimentary color wheels” or “learn color theory”, but that’s rarely actually helpful. That being said, one suggestion I quite like is to use a system similar to Pantone, specifically because it is often oriented to fashion and clothes making. It can sometimes be weird to think of the armor an Ultramarine wears as clothing, but it is, and one of the tricks that Pantone style color guides use that is often overlooked is that they think of color and shading in terms of wearability; how will that color look on the body, where, and at what angle? What color is best for an accent and not for a main flat surface? There’s sometimes little “jokes” (they’re not funny) about how miniature painting and make up application have a lot in common, which they do; this is another place to look for color stories and their considerations of how they can be utilized, with the important focus on what colors look good in “large” areas and what are better as accents.
Since he was already here, Raf wanted to chime in with his own answer, which I think is another great way to approach the concept:
Raf:Â Pick a scheme that tells a story. My Gitz are painted so that chaff is in all black and as they rank up into bosses and eventually the leader they don more and more white clothing. Only the richest most powerful Gitz could maintain clean laundry, it’s showing off like purple dye in royal times. Or my Deepkin are painted such that the dominant colors are blues/purples because reds/yellows/oranges are the first colors you lose as you dive deeper and deeper. Rank among the Akhelians is designated with coral gems/accessories because its a color you’d only see in the light, and dirty Namarti are not important enough for that. The only orange in their schemes is on the weapons because to the Akhelian, that’s all they are.
Greg also opted to chime in:
Greg: The thing about picking army colors is easy; just decide which Evangelion unit is your favorite and go with that, they’re all classic color combos.
Can’t argue with that. Hope that helps!
There’s No Funny Title: You Need To Stop Hurting Yourself to Play Army Men
Miss Marcy,
I really, really enjoy playing [miniatures game redacted to protect the innocent], but I recently found out that the main community organizer for [game] events in my area, who is also admin of the local [game] community Discord, has cordial connections with the far-right side of the [game] fandom, promotes their fan-work, etc. He’s been a decent enough guy to me face-to-face, but I worry a bit about the company he keeps. Community members have also been a bit hit-or-miss when it comes to respecting my pronouns, even though I’ve had them directly in my username on the community Discord for several months now.
[Game] is more niche than a Games Workshop game, so there aren’t many alternatives to playing with [mildly sus organizer]’s group. Someone else has started an alternative community Discord and has tried to organize folks there, but it hasn’t really taken off, and the alternate organizer themself is currently laying low after a recent doxxing incident.
I’ve got a buddy I trust who I play with sometimes, but he prefers to play [game] at a different scale than I do, so if I’m playing with him I don’t get the full experience I enjoy. He’s also organized game days at our local FLGS, but has discovered that it’s incredibly difficult to bring in more than 2-4 players without advertising in [mildly sus organizer’s] much larger Discord server.
Playing [game] online is possible, and I do have an online group playing a narrative campaign, but scheduling is harder when the people you play with are in different time zones.
I just want to play [game] with people, but I don’t want to walk into the “Nazi Bar Problem” in the process. Help!
Sincerely, She/Her
Dear She/Her,
The shortest answer I can give you is that “You are already in the Nazi Bar Problem,” and you need to leave it. I hope you will read the longer answer and realize that while it may sound harsh, it is honest, and it is from experience.
You are hurting yourself by playing this game with these people. And I don’t mean the miniature game.
You state in your question that you have had problems with this Discord respecting your pronouns; from that statement alone I am assuming you are trans, and even if you don’t consciously realize it, I think you subconsciously realize it or you wouldn’t have asked this question: These people not only do not respect you, they actively think you are beneath them and are deserving of contempt or worse. They view you as an intruder and a freak, and you allow them to do it by staying around them while they misgender you for fun (they are not doing it ‘accidentally’ over and over; they are boundary testing you). The “friendly enough” guy who is friends with Nazis is also a Nazi, because you don’t hang out with them unless you are one. His position as a community organizer for this game in your area does not preclude him from being a Nazi–there is an unfortunate history of fascists in the hobby, just like the Nazi Bar Problem–but because it would be ‘impolite’ to be hostile to you directly, they are hostile to you indirectly. If he cared, he would do something when people do not respect you, and he would also value your participation and inclusion in the space enough to stop them from doing it, but he doesn’t, because he doesn’t view you as a woman, he views you as a freak.
And you allow him to do so, because you desperately want to play the game, and are willing to do so at the cost of being treated as an Other, and as an object of derision or ridicule.
You need to realize that you are not safe in that space and that these people will not accept you. Your presence will not teach them, “trans people are actually deserving of respect,” because they should know that anyway. They would not actively misgender you if they wanted to be better, and considering you said the owner actively promotes right wing voices, it is clear these are likely not people “learning” to be around a trans person, as some might when we first come out.
I think you probably know a lot of this, though. There are often a lot of issues we face when living our lives that we don’t often confront our own internalized misogyny, transphobia, or even homophobia, let alone issues of racism; it can be hard to recognize them at first. “Hanging out with the boys” is easy, as long as you don’t think about it too hard–which it seems you have started to do–but then the pain lingers and nags at you. The other issue is that your alternatives don’t seem immediately satisfying, but you present them: Your friend that you trust, for example. You don’t mention too much more about them, but is it possible that you’ve told him about your experiences with this other group? Because it seems to me like there is a good possibility he’s trying to offer you an “out” from the toxic group you’re burning yourself in.
Even if he isn’t, you need to accept that playing the game “the exact best way you want” is not worth constantly exposing yourself to harm. You may need to settle for playing it less optimally or with more restrictions–or not at all–to instead put yourself in a safer space. We queer folk are often asked (or forced) to make concessions to others in order for us to inhabit their spaces, and we sometimes lack the resources to refuse. Safety, money, isolation, all of these things can tell us that some manner of putting our hand in the fire is worth it for the “momentary” distractions, but they aren’t, because your identity and your safety are not worth playing a game.
You deserve friends who respect you for who you are, who will defend you, who will provide a safe and protective space for you, not those who will welcome those who actively deny you all of those things. And you deserve to be a person who doesn’t compromise your sense of self in order to partake in a hobby, even if that means having to give the hobby up in the way you prefer it the most.
I truly do wish you the best of luck. I know this answer is already fairly long, but I had to reckon with this exact issue multiple times when I came out. The person I used to primarily play Guild Ball with regularly showed up to the store with a “Louder with Crowder” mug that he would prominently display on the table, and when it finally ate at me too much subconsciously, it broke the illusion I’d constructed that we “could just play despite our differences” to notice that the rest of the LGS crowd never included women or non-white passing Hispanics. There were no Black players, no women, no gay men. The table talk slowly started to seep into my head more noticeably, and I picked up on the misogyny, the sexual comments, the sexual assault jokes for losing rolls or units, all from people who would often claim to be or talk about being liberal. And I realized that it was because the guy I played against wasn’t the one “infiltrating”, he was just attracted to like-minded people who did a better job of pretending they weren’t like him. The nausea I felt reckoning with it and what I’d been putting myself into contact with wasn’t easy, and yet I found myself repeating it again in other places.
Like yourself, I went online to find people to engage with my hobbies, particularly roleplaying. The amount of outwardly (and worse, subconsciously) racist, transphobic, and misogynistic roleplaying communities and tables that I would tolerate simply to engage with my hobby is a far higher number than I like to think about. It actually wasn’t until a queer friend of mine questioned me as to why I seemed so grumpy and dissociative that I realized it was because I was compartmentalizing that pain from being around these types of groups in order to “have fun”.
So, She/Her, I really do hope you will do what your subconscious is already trying to tell you: You need to leave the bar, and you need to surround yourself with people who will respect you, even if that means you will have to play your favorite game a little less favorably for a while. I promise you that the harm you’re doing to yourself is not worth it.
Have any questions or feedback? Drop us a note in the comments below or email us at contact@goonhammer.com. Want articles like this linked in your inbox every Monday morning? Sign up for our newsletter. And don’t forget that you can support us on Patreon for backer rewards like early video content, Administratum access, an ad-free experience on our website and more.
