this post was submitted on 31 Jan 2024
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Haha, I may have exaggerated a bit for effect ;) I was on Taobao and found myself some reliable suppliers of dice and minis, which made sense since China produces everything for the rest of the world. I found some board games imports. There were a good few card games, too. But i dont recall finding any RPG boss in Chinese. This is very cool! I ended up finding gaming partners through the grapevine, but even they had difficulty finding suppliers and confirmed my suspicion that the hobby is still tiny. Nobody has any idea when I asked about rpg, boardgames, etc. Apart from a few card games board games. I found one gaming shop in the whole of Wuhan and it turns out it was a mini shop (again, no surprise when the manufacturing is all made in China). Anyway, it was 8 years ago, so it's no surprise things have changed. They do tend to do so very quickly, over there. Seeing translated versions is super encouraging! Thanks for taking the time, though.
Ah, yes, 8 years ago things would have been harder. (And I know the shop you mean in Wuhan for that time frame, I think. Mostly Warhammer 40K and a smattering of imported card and board games?)
Call of Cthulhu is the giant here, though D&D/Pathfinder is a pretty close second. Fate, of all things, is a decently close third as well, and going up. (There's Chinese-native Fate modules and campaign/setting packs popping up all over the place now, along with some native CofC stuff. Native D&D stuff is rarer.) Make no mistake it's still a fringe hobby with loads of room for growth, but it is no longer unheard of. Most people now have at least heard of it, even if they don't know exactly what it is.
Dude if you actually know a gaming shop in Wuhan, I'm interested! I'm going for a few weeks in April and it would be just fantastic to go to a real gaming shop :) The one I found was mostly military modeling, with a mezzanine where people were, I guess, painting (I didn't dare go up, my level of Chinese was abysmal at the time). And yeah, I noticed Cthulhu in your screenshots. I'm not totally surprised to see it, though. It's been I the top 3 in France for the last thirty years. Fate is definitely a surprise, though! I guess it all depends on who the "evangelists" are. I'm so getting a copy in Chinese when I get there, hahaha!
Fate was crowd-funded for translation on Modian. They wanted 50,000 RMB for the main rule book's translation. They got so much money (215,930.76 RMB) that they wound up translating everything Evil Hat had published for Fate up to that point.
Since then Fate has been a juggernaut here.
edited to add
If you run that page through Google Translate and scroll to the bottom, you can see an explanation for why D&D isn't as much a juggernaut as it is in North America. I'll quote the relevant bit:
One of the things that always seems to come as a surprise to people trying to sell into other cultures is that, well, they're other cultures. What might be thought of as "common tropes" in North American and European cultures may just be bewildering nonsense to others. (Like as he goes on to talk about after that snippet above, dragons here are WILDLY different than dragons in the west.) D&D is steeped heavily in western mythology and is going to feel too alien. A generic game like Fate will do better until homegrown games start popping up.
(He also takes a bit of a snipe against how D&D players tend to play the game like it's a wargame, but I'm not certain I agree with him there; I mean yes the tendency is there, but ... his rant looked a bit like BadWrongFun™ which I'm opposed to as a concept.)
You've no idea how exciting it is to read all this! This is the kind of convo I was desperately trying to find, to no avail, while there. I'm gonna have to parse through that page and see if I can find a few keywords to hook on for future reference. At least I know what I'm gonna look for when I get there in April, haha! Thank you so much for taking the time to show all this! :)