The Book of Erotic Fantasy - Where did it go wrong?

[Dark Mistress]

I agree with Mustrum_Ridcully about the fluff and tips and advice. They really needed that. personally i felt they had to much crunch in the book. Really this is a topic that a lot of crunch is not overly needed and can detract from the content. Feats should be few, same with magic items. There was really no need for gods or monsters really.

The art was just bad, a really really bad choice for the book. Real art instead of photoshopped pictures would have been much better.

To be fair i am mostly going off memory here, been some time since I have seen the book.

 

[DaveMage]

Hrm...It seems to me as though you havn't looked at the book.

No, I have looked at the book, although I may have focused too much on spells like "cursed orgasm", using the "command" spell to cast "masturbate" on someone, the "wet dreams" spell, and such.

I'm not saying the entire book is this way, as it certainly isn't, but enough of it is that makes a lot if it unusable, IMO.

 

[Brutorz Bill]

The art was TERRIBLE! Illustrations would have been so much better. Whoever decided to go the photo route really messed up. I'm no prude but after a look through the book, I shook my head and knew the book wasn't for me or my group.

 

[trancejeremy]

The art was the big problem, I think.

First off, it's very difficult to take real world people and manipulate them visually so they look like fantasy world creatures. It can be done (LOTR for instance), but it's very very difficult to do so without making it just look wrong or silly. I remember the London sourcebook for Shadowrun 1.0 did just that in part of the book, and it looked awful there, too.

Secondly, most modern day pornography tends to be somewhat glamourous, heavy on the makeup and airbrushing out blemishes and the like.

The art in BoEF was the otherway. Much of it was deliberately unglamourous and kinda well, icky. Sort of the stuff you'd find in things catering to people with various fetishes.

Also, while the tone was supposed to be serious (and it was somewhat pretentious) some of the stuff in it was kinda puerile. A lot of the spells. (Wasn't there one about Beer Goggles? Something like that. That's just silly.)

 

[ValhallaGH]

The art was a distraction. Even the more in-depth images (the halfling fighter for example) were more distractions than useful illustrations.

The book had too many game mechanics. Character skill in sex used far too many resources to ever allow an adventurer to really be able to invest in it and survive adventuring, despite the high likelihood of being experienced. As mentioned, some of the mechanics were simply silly, unnecessary, or just made me ask 'why?'. On the other hand, it had a lot of good, interesting, or well thought-out mechanics, showing the skill and insight of the design and development team.
A prime example is the creature section. While I often asked "why did they make this creature? why didn't they make this other creature?", the creatures themselves were (mostly) well designed. Oddly enough, much of that chapter focused upon creatures that are already in D&D, and mostly in the first Monster Manual (half fiends, half celestial, succubus, half fey, giant kin, etc.), making that section utterly superfluous.

There wasn't nearly enough advice on how to incorporate sex into a fantasy game tastefully. Like many other gamers, I'm often unintentionally offensive, rude, or awkward. RPing sex is going to have plenty of moments of all three, without the addition of the raw talent so many of us have. Advice on how to incorporate it smoothly and tastefully, or explicitly yet inoffensively for those groups that want that, would have been very much worthwhile.
The 100 adventure ideas what a good start on how to incorporate sex into a campaign, but it was just slapped onto the pages with no further development. Likewise, the organizations were interesting but I couldn't use any of them in any setting I play, with a straight face. No good at all.

Overall, the Book of Erotic Fantasy aimed to be the definitive d20 book on sex in fantasy gaming. The only reason it's succeeded is for lack of serious competition.

 

[JahellTheBard]

Mostly, art was very bad .... and caused most of the bad feeling of the book.
Material was .. well, mixed, something was good, something else not very inspired ...

But in spite of all problems , one of my players ( a female player ) get it and played a class from this book, and got a lot of fun playing ( my players all all grown-up, 28 to 40 years ).

In my little experience, i've found female players liked this book more than males .... of course, i always speak of grown-up players ..

 

[Sigurd]

I think for every 'problem' the book had you can find a successful work that was worse. I'll grant everyone their choice criticisms of the book but I think the market is the over-riding issue. Most games do not have a large overt sexual content.

I think its a great book. An open door on another facet of game worlds. I don't use it much but I have gotten more out of it than many d20 pubs.


Sigurd

 

[Simplicity]

One of the previous posters nailed something I think... I think the art was fine, but the problem was that the book over fetishized sex. Since it was already a touchy subject, bringing up the weirdnesses introduced by the book would just make it even more awkward.

The biggest thing that the book COULD have done to advance itself would have been to provide an adventure or two to demonstrated that sex can be handled maturely in a D&D game. There just aren't good examples of how to use the rules in play, and so people who are interested in the idea of BoEF are left... uh... unable to perform.

 

[Klaus]

I'll echo the sentiment on the art. And it's not like it's *hard* (pun unintended) to find artists that can portray sexy without being downright pr0n.

 

[Henry]

I only got to see the preview book for it, and of the stuff in there, I found the concept of the pleasure golem both unsettling, and perfectly in place for a game of D&D. How many wizards are the proverbial studious geeks, holing up in their labs or wizard's towers away from society for months at a stretch, doing their research?

But for the most part, I really didn't see a need for it in our games. We hardly ever handle issues of sex in game, except in the stereotypical "I spend my money on Ale & Whores" way.