Happy Wednesday dearest of readers, and welcome to the very first edition of “Mayday, Miss Marcy!” where I, the aforementioned Marcy, answer your questions of varying intensities of heat. And my oh my do we have a good salvo of opening questions. If you would like to submit your own questions, read on, and the instructions will reveal themselves (this is an attempt to make you read the article to the end).
All Dressed and Everywhere to Go
Miss Marcy, I have been a rather late arrival to the Warhammer Hobby ™️ and have had a ton of fun spending all of my surplus income on plastic toys that I paint into jewel-like objects of wonder. I have been learning the ropes of 40k, and hopefully soon Kill Team, with online pals and in conversations with my fellow Goonhammer Patrons ™️ – my own hopes are to participate in, and perhaps even organize, narrative events. However! I am concerned that I will go to a public event with some mediocre painted KT (or even a 2000 point army!) and will find myself to be ignorant enough to get into trouble, waste my opponents’ time, and generally be an embarrassment for reasons other than tactical incompetence or poor dice rolls. Any advice?
– Anxious in Arcadia Planitia
Dear Anxious,
There’s a somewhat tired saying that “Perfect is the enemy of good”, and then there’s also the old slogan of a certain shoe company, both of which are likely the most apt but reductive answer I could give right now, both of which are not actually helpful aside from being somewhat correct. One of the mistakes of social hobbies is the idea that there is some level of “must be this tall to enter the Grand Narrative” that bars entry from anyone who is not currently at that height, when it really is just our own social anxieties rearing their heads.
As a personal story, I remember that as a kid I wanted to go skiing very badly, but that I was afraid I didn’t know how to ski, nor did I have cool ski boots or anything stylish to wear, and so I continually talked myself out of it, until it was literally too late: my family moved to a climate where skiing was no longer possible. I’ve had similar experiences with other things: chickening out of playing at Friday Night Magic, and, tabletop wise, I kept refusing to take the plunge at my LGS for Guild Ball because my teams were just “not painted”, until another player shoved his figures into my hand and forced me to play. I was lucky, but not everyone is going to have that person.
My best advice here is to find a local store and start there. Meet the players, feel the vibe, and then bring your stuff with you. You could even put it in the car with you, and once you feel comfortable, go “hey, be right back!” and go get it. If you have local friends (or online ones!) going to an event, plan it as a meet up and treat the event as the location, not the destination itself. Keep in mind that everyone, whether it is your LGS or a big show like Adepticon, is there to have fun and engage in the hobby like you are. So go out there and make a splash already!
These Mould Lines Are Making Me Crazy, Jerry!
Miss Marcy, is it normal that I spend 6-10 hours (per unit) solely cleaning up mould lines and sprue vents? It sounds completely absurd since everywhere I see people say they get a unit from sprue to finished assembly in an hour or less, but at the same time I do not feel like I am being wasteful with time – it takes some doing to get mould lines smooth especially across complex surfaces, and getting a sprue gate flat (especially if it was on a curved surface) is tricky. Am I missing some clever trick to all this? It is undeniably my least favourite stage of the process, but it also feels entirely prudent to do it so that the unevenness won’t stand out once painted.
– Persistent Painter
Dear Persistent,
As if borrowing from my previous answer, “Perfect is the enemy of good,” I am going to start by saying that there is some level at which you need to measure “good enough” with “time invested”. I think the real question here is: are you unhappy with the time it is taking you, or are you grass-is-greener-ing yourself about how fast it seems other people are doing the same thing you are? Your process as you describe it seems to be that you are looking to reach a level you are satisfied with, which means that you really are unlikely to find a ‘faster’ way of doing it that you will be satisfied with. While there are certainly guides you can read about things in this hobby–such as the ones we publish here on Goonhammer–none of that really matters in practice, because you are going to be the one who has to look at the model and go ‘I could have made that smoother’.
Can you live with the outcome if knowing you could have done it ‘better’, rather than ‘done’? It also depends on what you are modeling for and why; are you a competitive player? If so, perhaps it is worth deciding how much time to invest when you have tens to a hundred models to complete. But if you are a builder and painter, then there really isn’t a set amount of time that is ‘correct’, only what is correct for you. You say you are satisfied or at least don’t feel like you are being wasteful, which makes me consider a secondary question: have you considered that the time you are spending on these models is time you’re using to decompress, relax, or otherwise focus yourself? Because it sounds like a very high level of investment into something ‘small’, but doing it makes you happy. And at the end of the day if your hobby is making you satisfied and happy, there’s really nothing else you need to be doing; you’re already doing it “right”.
The Fault Lies with You!
Miss Marcy, my local scene is very Bolt Action or 40k based, how do I get them convinced Trench Crusade and Necromunda are the way forward?
Dear Reader,
We’ll ignore the fact that you didn’t give me a name to refer to you by just this once, okay? Anyway, your answer has a possibly unsatisfying answer: How much work are you willing to do in order to get your local friends/players to invest in new game systems? It is easy to overlook the cost of investment that our hobby asks; it isn’t so simple to just pick up a few models and slam them on the table, as you need to build and paint them, as well as buy relevant rule books, dice or tools, and find time in your existent schedule to fit in something new, which you may not like.
But let’s try and help you out a little bit more: I assume you’ve tried selling your locals on these games by telling them about it or demonstrating the game for them, right? If not, well… Guess what you should do next! Get some models together, study the rules enough to give someone the general gist of how to play, and like your local GW store manager, demo the game for someone who seems interested. The best way to get other people interested in the game is to see people playing it, so if you can show it off to people, that will do some work for you; from there, try and have units that people could borrow to play or try the game with you, and try to focus on giving them the “vibe” of the game rather than the full gaming experience.
My local store pre-Pandemic was almost exclusively Guildball, and that happened because every time people would show up, the Guildball players would chat up new people, demo the game, let them try it with their models, and provide easy and encouraging ways to get into the game. After a while, the store was literally known for GB to the point that it was the regional destination four tournaments. You can do that too, dear reader, but the fault lies with you: you need to do the work.
Based on the Best-Selling Novel (Literally)
Miss Marcy, how do I best explain my decision to base my 40k Imperial Knights on the popular romantacy book series “A Court of Thorns and Roses”? It feels a venn diagram that shouldn’t cross over.
– Prythiens’ Techpriest
Fun Discourse, or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the List
Miss Marcy, how do I find the balance between what’s fun for me and what will win a game of 40k? all of my lists that I actually want to play (Demon engines Vashtorr spam, Imperial Agents or Death Company) get me wiped by turn 3. is there a balance between meta and fun (for me) to play?
– Macka B (not the cucumber guy)
Dear Macka B (not the cucumber guy),
I have a lot of questions about what that parenthetical implies but I’m not going to linger on it. Anyway! This is the classic question of “fun” versus “winning”, in the sense that there is occasionally a divide between the two (after all, winning should be fun). There are a few options here for advice, although you didn’t quite provide a lot of detail. However, if you are playing competitive matches and against a fairly competitive group of players, the reason you are likely not having fun in the long run is that you’re essentially playing off-meta and handing those players free wins. If that’s not the case and you’re still losing that fast in casual matches, I think the question needs to be more geared towards the type of people you are playing against and how to best manage your fun versus meta angle.
Playing to Lose is an actual strategy in two ways–one is that you are angling to lose early and come back from an easier bracket–but your type seems closer to the type of PtL gamer I run into with board gaming, who is the type of person who “wants to have fun” but then has, always, the least amount of fun. Because losing is not fun. So this makes me want to ask you (and, I suppose, you can ask yourself): why are you playing “fun” lists if you know they are going to lose, and that you will spend most of your time sitting at the shop doing nothing?
To pull from my time playing Magic, I often ran into a similar problem to yours when the group I played with was hyper-competitive and very knowledgeable about the game. For them, “fun” was finding turn 1-3 kills and combos and building Commander decks that had archaic and obtuse combos, and my “fun” was building flavorful decks that were all based on a theme. Suffice to say that I just continually got walloped and was often a “free win” for a little while, and then swapped my decks for more “meta” decks tailored to the players around me. At first I was a little disappointed because I felt I was not playing “to have fun,” but when I began to win, I realized that I was, well, having fun, because I was winning, but also, the other players began to treat me a little differently because I was no longer a free lunch and was instead someone of comparable skill.
Without knowing the location you play at and why, I think there is something I can offer you that might split the difference, dear reader: you should bring 2 armies with you. Bring one for more “meta” games, and another for a “beer and pretzels” game with people who are playing at a lower skill ceiling or who are similarly interested in playing jank/flavor lists. You may find that occasionally dipping your toes into the “meta” makes you a better player, and that by proxy might actually make your “fun” armies more competitive by helping you improve your skill. Since you’re already invested in 40k, you can probably do this laterally also–find armies of better “meta” rank that you could perhaps use some of your current components in, and thus lower the bar to entry for your investment.
I would recommend narrative play, but, well, I think Greg really summed up a lot of the problems of “Narrative” play last week in his intro.
Looking for Questions!
Thanks for reading the first edition of Mayday, Miss Marcy! I hope you found these answers helpful, even if they weren’t yours! If you’d like to submit your own questions, Patrons can do so via the Discord using a very handy bot to ask their questions anonymously! As for non-Patron readers, I’ll be selecting questions left as comments here on the article, although priority will always go to Patron questions first! So if you have a need for advice from your dear pal Marcy, please submit your questions! Until next time dear reader!
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