So, I Finally Learned What a vFed Is

I’ve been around this hobby for a long time. Long enough that you would think I’d have at least a little understanding of most of the branches that have grown off the eWrestling tree by now. Written feds, angle feds, RP feds, booked feds, judged feds, forums, websites, Discord groups, old-school mailing lists, all of that stuff... yep, I know all about it.

But every now and then, I’ll realize there is still a whole corner of this world that I’ve seen from a distance without ever really stopping to understand it. That was the case for me with video game feds (vFeds), sometimes also called CAW feds, which are usually run using games like Fire Pro Wrestling World, WWE 2K, and others.

Now, I’ve seen them around for years. I’ve seen people post clips, shows, graphics, entrances, simulated matches, and all of that. I understood the basic idea in the most surface-level way possible: created wrestlers in a video game doing wrestling things. But I never really dug into how it worked or why people enjoyed it. I'm pretty sure I've brushed it off more than once as "that's dumb."

I've seen a lot more of them on my timeline as of recent and figured maybe it's time to learn about them more and not just brush them off. So, I started asking around.

This article is for others like me. You know what they are, but you have no idea what they actually are.

A vFed, from what I’m gathering, is still fantasy wrestling at its core. People are still creating characters, building promotions, tracking wins and losses, developing champions, running shows, and trying to make their fictional wrestling universe feel alive. The difference is that instead of everything being driven mainly by written roleplays and/or written match results, the end result is built through video games. Matches can be simulated, recorded, streamed, edited, or packaged like actual wrestling content found on any eFed. Promos, if they exist for that vFed, may be video edits instead of written roleplays. Although some vFeds still rely on written RPs. Characters are often made as CAWs, or create-a-wrestlers, with their appearances, movesets, entrances, and in some cases their in-ring logic all built into the game.

And before I get attacked, no, I do not consider you eWrestling character in a normal eFed a CAW. I know some people use that terminology, but I don't and I think it's weird. Same for pic bases being called "Posers." But those are opinions for another column another time.

I spoke with The Spider King, who you can find on X at @eye_am_tempest. He broke down Fire Pro Wrestling World for me in a way that made the light bulb go off. But to be fair, I've been asking people to explain it to me like I'm 5, so that helped.

Fire Pro, especially on Steam, has a huge Workshop community where people create and share wrestlers, referees, arenas, ring textures, and more. There are even collections built around wrestlers with completed CPU logic, which matters because Fire Pro is not just about how the wrestler looks, but how they actually behave once the match starts.

The Spider King explained that he has thousands of wrestlers downloaded from all over wrestling history. Smoky Mountain, early 90s WCW, 1998 WCW, WWF Attitude Era, classic NWA, ROH, AEW, ECW, AAA, Dragon Gate, and plenty more. He has run tournaments and leagues out of his own imagination, using spreadsheets to track records, stats, match ratings, and even referee stats.

When I read that, I started to chuckle a little, because that is absolutely the same sickness a lot of us have in traditional eFedding. The format may be different, but the obsession is familiar. It is still the same “let me build a whole promotion and track everything like it actually happened” mindset.

I did think though, his life may be easier if he did all his record keeping on a website using something like the eFed Management Suite. But hey, to each their own.

Where Fire Pro seems to get really interesting is in the logic. The Spider King pointed out that the graphics are not modern, state-of-the-art visuals, but that is not really the point. The point is the simulation underneath it. You can spend hours creating one wrestler, real or fictional, and that means much more than picking a face, tights, and a finisher. Fire Pro’s CPU logic lets creators influence how a wrestler works, how often they do certain moves, when they go for pins, how they build toward finishers, and how they generally act in the ring. Guides for Fire Pro CPU logic describe it as one of the biggest differences between a wrestler that only looks right and one that actually wrestles right in simulated matches.

That part fascinated me because, in a weird way, it is still writing. It is just not writing in paragraphs.

When we write an eFed match, we decide how a character moves. We decide if they are reckless, methodical, arrogant, cowardly, violent, flashy, or desperate. We decide if they go for the cover too soon, if they play to the crowd, if they target a body part, or if they try to end things quickly. In Fire Pro, from what I’m understanding, a lot of that character work gets translated into logic, movesets, percentages, tendencies, and behavior.

That is a very different creative language, but it is still character work.

Yeah, a lot of you may be saying "Ben, we've played video games. We know how they work" and you're right. But in all my years of creating my characters in WWE Games, I've never thought about the real logic behind it. But I'm also a "slide the sliders all the way up" kind of guy.

Of course, The Spider King was also honest about the downside, and that downside is time. Creating one wrestler properly can take hours. Those, like me, who have played the WWE 2k games can understand that. If you are making an original character for someone else, especially for an eFed style setup, you are not just slapping together a look and calling it good. You are building the appearance, the moves, the entrance feel, the logic, the behavior, and all the little things that make that wrestler come across correctly once the match starts.

That sounds awesome, but it also sounds like a petty hefty workload. Anyone who has ever run an eFed knows the danger zone there. A cool idea can become a second job really fast if you are not careful. 

I also talked to dalogicalgamer on Discord, who gave me more of the WWE 2K side of things. His explanation was pretty simple and honestly helped me understand the difference right away. He said it is pretty much the same as an eFed, except there is not traditional writing in the same way. Instead, promos for his fed are more video-edit based. A handler might edit their own promo, send audio for someone else to turn into a video, or just explain what the promo should be about and let the fed runner handle the edit.

That is where I started to see how this connects to what a lot of us already know, but also how it becomes its own thing. In a traditional eFed, the promo is usually the written roleplay. That is where the handler’s voice comes through. In a vFed, that same idea might become a video package. The character may speak through edited footage, audio, entrance shots, game capture, music, graphics, or whatever else the creator is using to get the point across.

WWE 2K obviously has a huge creation culture of its own, with Community Creations allowing players to browse and download custom Superstars, arenas, entrances, and more. Even unofficial tools and databases exist just to help people find and organize quality CAWs, which I actually had no idea about.

The more I learned, the more I realized that vFeds are not some totally separate thing from eFedding. They are more like a neighboring branch of the same tree. The motivations are very similar. People want to create wrestlers, run promotions, tell stories, crown champions, and make something that feels bigger than just a game save or a document on a hard drive. The main difference is the way it comes to life.

In a written fed, the match result is usually crafted. Someone writes the action, shapes the beats, controls the finish, and presents the story in prose. In a vFed, especially one leaning into simulation, the game can become part of the creative process. You may build the wrestlers, set the logic, create the arena, decide the card, and then let the match play out. That means there is always the possibility that the result will surprise you.

That unpredictability could be a problem, depending on what kind of fed you want to run. If your story absolutely requires a specific person to win, then a pure simulation might fight against your booking. But I can also see how that would be part of the fun. The game might hand you an upset, a weird finish, a shock title change, or a match that turns out better than anything you would have planned. At that point, the fed head becomes less like a traditional writer controlling every beat and more like a promoter reacting to what happened.

That is interesting to me.

I do not know if it is something I would personally run or even join, mostly because it seems like just too much work to play a video game for me. Between creating characters, setting logic, editing videos, capturing footage, building shows, and keeping everything organized, it sounds like a lot. But I understand the appeal now in a way I really did not before.

And I also want to give a special shout out to an old friend of mine, Lee Best, because from what I’ve seen, he seems to have moved into this area with shows airing on the HOWrestling Twitch channel. The channel describes itself as a live streaming home for High Octane Wrestling, XPRO Wrestling, MVW, sVo, and more under the 97RPT.com umbrella. High Octane Wrestling itself has a long history going back to its original launch in the early 2000s, with Lee Best tied to its creation and leadership, so seeing someone from that side of the hobby working in or around this kind of presentation makes the whole thing feel a little less foreign to me.

That may actually be the biggest thing I took away from this. Once I stopped looking at vFeds as “that video game version of eWrestling” and started listening to people explain how they build them, it stopped feeling like a completely different hobby. It started feeling like another way people are doing the same thing we have always done.

They are creating.

They are organizing.

They are tracking.

They are presenting.

They are trying to make fictional wrestling feel real enough that someone else wants to watch, follow, react, and care.

There are written feds, angle feds, RP feds, simulation feds, CAW leagues, vFeds, and probably a few other branches of the hobby I still haven’t properly stumbled into yet. Every one of them is someone’s way of keeping the magic alive, and I think that is the part worth paying attention to.

So to The Spider King, thank you for explaining the Fire Pro side and helping me understand just how much thought can go into the logic behind a simulated wrestler. To dalogicalgamer, thank you for explaining the WWE 2K promo and video-edit side in a way that made sense immediately. And to anyone else like me who has seen the term vFed or CAW fed for years without really knowing what it meant, hopefully this helped pull the curtain back a little.

It is fantasy wrestling with a controller, a creation suite, a capture setup, editing software, logic systems, spreadsheets, imagination, and probably way more patience than I currently have.

And honestly, now that I understand it better, I think that sounds pretty damn cool.

Hey readers!

I'd love to hear more from the vFed community! Want to write vFed related columns and articles? Want to add more info now found here? Get ahold of us! We'd love to highlight your work too.

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