You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake.

Hey kids. Sorry for the big gap in updates. You'd be amazed how much costochondritis can jerk around your passion for things.

So. Guessing game time. Guess what annoys me most on a new contract. Using the entrance music of whoever happens to be popular in WWE right now? Nope. One of the same handful of picbases every fed seems to be clogged up with? Nope. Yet another psycho heel promising to cleanse the promotion of the scum inhabiting it? Nope. A 400lb guy pulling moonsaults and planchas as regular moves? No, not even that.

Annoying as all of that stuff is, what's really guaranteed to kill my interest in a contract is being told about how the character is a huge deal, a million-time hall of famer, a trillion-time world champion, courted by major sponsors, a worldwide legend the fans will clamour for and opponents will fall weak at the knees just thinking about.

No, you're not.

Sorry to burst your bubble, but a hobby as loose and informal as e-fedding doesn't work that way. It doesn't matter how big you are, how much you've accomplished - pick a random startup fed from Chris Hart's, and chances are nobody there will have heard of you. If Edge or Cena joined TNA tomorrow, they'd start at the top, but all of TNA's fans will instantly recognise them. Much of the time in fedding, that ain't gonna happen - you're only known to the people you've shared a fed with. Why should bookers make you a main eventer right from the off when they haven't even seen your writing? How are your opponents supposed to respond to a Hogan-level superstar, about whom they know absolutely nothing? This comes back to the unified canon thing; being a world champion basically means nothing in e-fedding, outside of one fed and its circle of affiliates. I don't mean that to denigrate titles within that context, but pretty much every character who's been around more than a couple of years has been a world champion somewhere.

Okay, look at Asylum or Magnum's list of accomplishments, and you can't help but be impressed. These are guys who've almost never been without a title, who've held literally scores of honours over their careers. Clearly, you don't get that much without experience and talent. But that doesn't mean that when someone as good as Asylum or Magnum walks into a random fed, they're automatically pushed to the top of the card. Yet I see no end of people with less than a quarter of those achievements expecting exactly that to happen to them. Sorry, but just no.

Did Gangrel ever play Vampire?

Random bored Google and Wikipedia trawling turned up something very strange: tabletop wrestling roleplaying games, both card games and pen and paper.

I vaguely remember the old WWE card game, Raw Deal, WWE's attempt to cash in on the booming (circa-2000) collectible card game industry. In fairness I never actually played it, and maybe it's really good. Maybe it's the best wrestling-based card game ever, in the crowded field of two. Legends of Wrestling comes in full boxed sets, has quite charming black and white ink drawings as opposed to Raw Deal's glossy full photos and, like the terrible GameCube game of the same name, isn't tied to one particular period or promotion so the biggest hook is in putting together dream matches - Antonio Inoki vs. Steve Corino? King Kong Bundy vs. Tiger Mask? The Missing Link vs. The Mountie? Sherri Martel vs. Bobby Heenan? The Valentine Brothers vs. The Voodoo Kin Mafia? If only I knew anyone who was into both card gaming and wrestling, I'd get this and try it out, especially given that the transatlantic handling and shipping charges are less than five bucks.

I might end up getting it anyway since the company who publish the game, Filsinger Games, also publish a pen-and-paper wrestling roleplaying game - in space! For such is the utterly insane but surprisingly well-reviewed Champions of the Galaxy, which looks to be a mixture of WWF's late eighties/early nineties "We'll make a gimmick of out of anything!" bombast with a kind of spacefaring fantasy superhero galactic civil war saga that would bring George Lucas out in envious hives. This looks so legendarily insane I just have to try it. There's also an online version which looks kinda like a cross between a traditional online card game such as Pox Nora, Magic: the Gathering Online or Armageddon Empires, with Adam Ryland's wrestling management sims. I might try investigating further, if I do I'll post back with my thoughts.

Also well-received was Errant Knight Games' Kayfabe, an altogether more grounded simulation which seems to focus less on in-ring competition and more on backstage relationships and politics. Again I'd love to try it out at some point, but I'm lacking wrestling fans to play with in my area. I'm also aware of a more combat-oriented game called Wrestling Warriors by one Walt Spafford, and a White Wolf release entitled Streetfighter RPG, but more information is eluding me on both of them at present. Supposedly Streetfighter is about shoot fighting but I suspect the source I read might be a little confused, as I'm positive White Wolf had the license to the Street Fighter beat-em-up series for a while...

Of course as with the Raw Deal card game, where there's money to be had WWE will jump on it. The WWF Adventure Game was an early nineties attempt to let people be their favourite superstars in the comfort of their own living rooms - y'know, before wrestling videogames were any good. It was moderately well received by critics of the era but has not aged well apparently, not least because most of the biggest stars in it have long since moved on. Might be worth a try if I ever see a cheap copy somewhere - I can't see it being a collector's item somehow.

That all this stuff exists shouldn't really surprise me as much as it does. For one thing, people will make a game out of anything, and for another I'm still waiting on trying out some of the stuff in XWF, the almost-shoot wrestling supplement for White Wolf's dark superheroes setting, Aberrant - the first game since Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door to have me truly excited about the prospect of playing a jobber...

The Size Advantage

A big barometer of success in running an e-fedding seems to be the size of your fed - the number of weekly shows you produce, the number of members you have. The larger the better. RoughKut definitely works on this principle. Something occurred to me about that recently - it's bullshit. I've been on feds with 200+ members and you know something? I hated them. They're impersonal and cliquey. More members means you're less likely to go under but it also means that newer or less active members are more likely to be marginalised.

I can see the counter-argument to that; newer and less active members ought to have an incentive to become an active part of the community and get further up the card. The larger a roster is, the tougher the field is, the harder the glass ceiling is to break, and that stimulates members to work harder. Those who aren't interested in pushing themselves that hard shouldn't have joined in the first place.

This makes the mistake of assuming everyone wants the same thing, that everyone wants to be the most successful wrestler, and every fed ought to want to be the most successful - what about those who just want to hang out and have fun? It's a chicken/egg situation - on large feds, very often, only established veterans become big players - but only big players become established veterans. Furthermore, I for one have always found storytelling less involved in any fed of about 100+ members; there's so much going on you're expected to keep track of and so few people are interested in anyone else's storylines.

Now, I'm not saying that all large feds ought to keel over and die. Promotions like Pro Wrestling Entertainment, Inc. have their place, no doubt, and there's nothing wrong with being competitive. But there's also nothing wrong with NOT being so competitive. But personally when I want to get to know a bunch of people, kick back and have a laugh, and more than anything really roleplay with others rather than just compete for championships, I'm going to go to a smaller and more intimate place.

I'm stopping now before this devolves into ludology versus narratology - don't worry, I'm sure that one will come too at some point. :P