Fudge: Popularity Wars

Episode IV

A New Hope of Renewed Interest in a 10+ year old game

There was some discussion a few weeks ago on the Fudge List about trying to make Fudge more popular in the mainstream. Specifically, twice in two months, two different people have come up with lengthy diatribes about how the fans and publishers are doing everything wrong and need to do it this particular way to make Fudge commercially successful. (These diatribes seem to have been triggered by Grey Ghost Games' recent release of the 10th anniversary edition of Fudge.)

A lot of the rant and following discussion has focused around making Fudge more appealing to people who don't play Fudge. Things like, publishers need to put out big genre books for three or four major genres, with strong worlds and customized, completely fleshed-out rules, and then follow them up with lots of support supplements.

Basically, do what the big publishers are doing with d20, GURPS, Hero System, and so on.

I was listening to the Ogre Cave Audio Report awhile back (http://www.ogrecave.com/audio/, 8/29 episode), and they were talking about GenCon, what was hot, and RPG sales in general. And they were talking about the general sales slump, and how the d20 bubble seems to have already burst. (WotC's big new products weren't RPGs.)

But there was one quote that stood out as applying to this discussion.

"...you can't beat D&D by being D&D."

Let's take a step back and look at the whole situation.

What is Fudge? Like GURPS, it's a set of rules with no particular world attached to the core book. But unlike GURPS, it doesn't say, "These are the rules." It says, "These are some rules, feel free to pick and choose; add, modify and remove to create the game you want."

This is what made Fudge popular. It was free, and it granted freedom to explore and modify and create the game you want it to be. You could do this with any game, but Fudge was the catalyst for forming a community in which "house rules" were the norm, not the exception.

Now, Fudge is over ten years old, and it's never done very well in the commercial marketplace, and it's online community has always been relatively small. It won't die because it has devoted fans and doesn't depend on a commercial publisher to keep it going, but it's never really caught on in a firestorm of commercial or non-commercial popularity. In part, because in its current form, it appeals primarily to experienced gamemasters who are dissatisfied with all the other systems out there, and who find it more desirable to build on Fudge than to write house rules for another game.

The common line of thinking is that worlds sell, systems don't. And that leads us to this problem of making Fudge popular. Because when Fudge fails to become a solid hit, some fans' response is to say, "Well, systems don't sell. Write really good world books that use the Fudge rules and those will sell."

And isn't there some weirdness to this logic? Because if you're selling the product on the strength of the world, has that made Fudge itself any more popular? And, if it has made the rules more popular, it's made that implementation of the rules more popular. Like theD&D3 version of d20 isn't made more popular by the popularity of Mutants & Masterminds.

And don't you think that if the publishers, or even the fans, could develop a great world to catch non-Fudge players attention, they would have done it by now?

Let me give you an analogy...

A few weeks ago, I bought a bunch of audio recording gear so I could try something I've been wanting to do for a couple years... record audiobooks. Now that I've got this equipment, I'm thinking I might like to try creating a podcast (essentially a MP3-based "radio" show). But I've got this problem... I don't know what I'd talk about. If I could just come up with something to talk about that I think people would listen to, I could create a podcast show and people would love it, and in making my podcast popular, I'd justify using my recording equipment.

So you see the parallel? Fudge is my recording equipment. The topic of my podcast is the yet-to-be-discovered "hit world" that will make Fudge sell. I'm putting the cart before the horse... I have this great tool, but I have no good idea as to what I should do with it to make my use of this tool popular.

Here these Fudge fans have this great tool. And they think, "Aww, man, this is a great tool. I want to use it to share something great with the rest of the world, so they'll see how great Fudge is. Now... I just need to come up with some content to help sell Fudge."

If it's the world that sells a product, then that world can be sold with any rules that work reasonably well. And if someone has a world worth selling, why pick Fudge when there are other free game systems with better (or more positive) name recognition which would translate into sales? If it's really good, license GURPS for it and you'll immediately have a much wider potential audience than if you use Fudge.

Back to the Ogre Cave Audio Report... what was one of the big thing in RPGs at GenCon this year? Indie games. The Forge collective and The Wicked Dead Brewing Company especially. Little games, special-purpose games, even nearly one-time-use games. Some of them exist as an experiment in rules, but even the experiments have worlds attached to them. But all of these games have one thing in common: they are niche games. And they apparently sold like hotcakes. (And in many cases, I think the system did sell the product. Many indie games are experimental and have some really weird mechanics, and people want to check them out because of that. It's not like I was interested in the setting of Trollbabe when I bought it.)

Very few of these games have continued support. You get one book, and the author is off to work on some other project. You might get a sequel or two, but you're not going to get a new book every two months to support the world.

The big genres markets are already saturated. It's very difficult to create an innovative fantasy setting that really catches people's attention. What catches their attention is more off-the-wall stuff, like The Secret Lives of Gingerbread Men or Dogs in the Vineyard.

We already have a double-handful of fantasy, superhero, sci-fi, and horror settings. Are we giving the customers what they want by creating yet another run-of-the-mill fantasy, superhero, sci-fi, or horror setting? Is that really what they want? I know, the pontificators aren't suggesting a run-of-the-mill setting... but that brings us back to what I said earlier: If any of the publishers had a innovative world in the wings, don't you think they'd be publishing them? They don't need the fans to tell them, "Hey! You need to come up with some really neat stuff for me to buy!" Duh.

And this brings me around to my really big question:

What is the point of making Fudge popular?

If it's the world that matters, there are plenty of great worlds out there. We already buy them and adapt them to Fudge.

Some people want Fudge to be like GURPS; the same level of support but with different rules. But you can't beat GURPS by being GURPS, to paraphrase the earlier quote. (But really, GURPS continuing support for any of their worlds was mediocre at best until GURPS Traveller.)

"Well, you're just a cry-baby and don't want Fudge to be popular! You want the community to remain small!" That came out in the discussion after both rants on the Fudge List.

I have nothing against Fudge being popular. I'm just trying to be realistic here. The arguments and "advice" for what would make Fudge popular just don't make any sense to me.

Gateway to Fudgie goodness? If all the fans of this new big, innovative world line want a complete game and not a construction kit (as is argued by those pushing for this), why would they somehow come over to the "tweak it all to heck" side that makes up the core of Fudge fandom now? If you're trying to create products for people who don't want to write up their own game system, why would experiencing an implementation of Fudge cause them to suddenly decide that they don't like your implementation and start designing their own?

And if the people you want to reach don't want to do their own designing, how is Fudge is any better for them than what they're running now? Why should they prefer Fudge over other games if they already do not find Fudge appealing?

I just don't think it's going to happen. The new F10 hardback only appeals to existing Fudge gamemasters. Any new product line that sells on the strength of its setting isn't going to make the do-it-yourself Fudge more popular. I can't imagine a "breakout" product involving Fudge that would make Fudge itself more popular.