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:
Every time [our American friend Scott] came to JOYPIE, he would bring us a game as a gift and actively encourage us to participate in the DND games hosted by him. I tried to participate out of curiosity and for the purpose of practicing English speaking. In order to facilitate learning and operation, I decided to choose a big “double player” [probably dual-class? — ed.] - Priest profession, and selected dwarves based on racial characteristics. However, after several group experiences, I decided to give up. The reason was not the communication problem in English, but that I felt that our minds were not in the same picture at all.。
Scott and I had a candid exchange about this embarrassing experience. We both believed that it was because the fantasy background of DND was too strong. For people like me who have little in-depth understanding of the background of Western fantasy worlds, there is no way. You can do role-playing with just your imagination. From a cultural perspective, it is the cultural differences between East and West.
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! :)
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! :)