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Do you think the OGL was a good idea?

Do you think the OGL was a good idea?

  • Yes.

    Votes: 112 84.8%
  • No.

    Votes: 14 10.6%
  • I don't care either way.

    Votes: 6 4.5%

I wonder since most support the OGL, what they thought of the Book of Erotic Fantasy?

I didn't care for it. I didn't have any objection, but the nature of the topic was such that I saw little use for it in my game, and the quality wasn't so high that I felt I had to find a spot for it.

Now I never understood the HUGE backlash that hit the book, weather you liked it or not. However It was seen at the time as a 'Mistake' in the OGL that it was allowed to flourish...

I think it says a lot that WotC felt comfortable publishing "The Book of Vile Darkness", but felt the need to change the d20 license to try to block someone else from publishing "The Book of Erotic Fantasy". But that's about our society's relative attitudes to violence and sex, which is an awfully big can of worms right there.
 

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I wonder since most support the OGL, what they thought of the Book of Erotic Fantasy?

There are two possible ways to take this question; what we thought of the book itself, and whether or not we think that this book's existence somehow showcased the worst of what the OGL made possible.

In the first case, I thought that the BoEF was a good idea that suffered from poor execution. The idea of making a sourcebook about sex, and having it be something more than a string of punchlines, was not a bad one. However, the book did not pull it off well. The mechanics needed another round or two of editing (coming out just as 3.5 debuted didn't help), and the idea of using photoshopped artwork rather than illustrations was not a good one, but those weren't the book's biggest failures.

The book's biggest failure was not realizing that having sex be the book's sole unifying theme wasn't enough.

What I mean by that is that splatbooks tend to be written around a theme, and I think the most successful ones are where the theme has a strong enough in-game presence that most of the new material can be introduced via that presence. If I buy a desert-themed supplement, for example, I'll be able to bring most of the material into the game when the PCs venture into a desert. If I've bought a book about were-creatures, I'll get a lot of use out of it when I have the enemies in an adventure be a pack of lycanthropes, and so on.

Simply having a book with new classes, spells, magic items, feats, etc. that all focus on sex doesn't give me enough in-game rationale for why these sexual-themed elements are suddenly so prominent. This, coupled with the natural awkwardness of highlighting sex as part of the game, make it difficult to introduce any of the BoEF's elements into an existing campaign, and that's leaving aside issues of balance (now, to be fair, the book did have a few in-game elements in it, mostly a few new deities and a couple of sex-themed organizations - all of these, however, were very weakly presented).

Of course, virtually all of these issues were corrected in what I consider to be the BoEF's spiritual successor, Sisters of Rapture (disclaimer; I collaborated on this book).

As for the second way of looking at the question...

Now I never understood the HUGE backlash that hit the book, weather you liked it or not. However It was seen at the time as a 'Mistake' in the OGL that it was allowed to flourish...

I think the backlash was largely overstated. It, much like the BoEF itself, was largely flash-in-a-pan. It was one of those instances where most people seemed to acknowledge that something like this could be done, but didn't like that somebody had done it; most everyone steadfastly ignored it (which was easy enough to do, given how the Book itself didn't go over that well) and moved on.
 
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Now I never understood the HUGE backlash that hit the book, weather you liked it or not.

The US has some issues around sex, if you hadn't noticed.

However It was seen at the time as a 'Mistake' in the OGL that it was allowed to flourish...

I can understand it. The d20 license existed largely to get other publishers to support D&D, right? So, what content gets published, to first approximation, reflects on D&D and the brand. Given aforementioned issues with sex, now we have a problem - people who can publish things that impact the brand's reputation. While you or I may get the difference, Grandmama isn't going to care about the nuances between WotC and some other publisher. She's just going to see some nasty smut associated with that game her grandson plays.

Opening up the door for others to negatively impact D&D's reputation is something one can reasonably call a mistake, I think.
 
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I wonder since most support the OGL, what they thought of the Book of Erotic Fantasy?
I have a copy. It's a book that really could have been done a lot better, but I have no problems with it being produced.

Now I never understood the HUGE backlash that hit the book, weather you liked it or not. However It was seen at the time as a 'Mistake' in the OGL that it was allowed to flourish...
I think [MENTION=22424]delericho[/MENTION] nailed this one. We can have hundreds of books about killing things. We can have rules for torture. We can even have cheesecake art.

But acknowledging that sex is an important part of people's lives? That's apparently a bridge too far.

I was talking about gaming recently with, of all people, a guy doing canvasing for a gay marriage group. We ended up talking a bit about how Paizo does a good job with that stuff, but that the failure of the industry traditionally isn't being homophobic so much as being completely sexphobic.

There's probably a larger political issue there, but the thing that actually bothers me most about it is having internalized that same behavior. So I also end up creating things with a fairly nuanced view of violence, but no acknowledgement of sex, sexuality, or even romance. Bleh.

Cheers!
Kinak
 

I thought the controversy was mainly over the d20 System Trademark License rather than the OGL. There was no disputing they could publish under OGL, but they had tried to do it under the d20 license and that's when WotC changed the license to prevent it.

Considering What's New with Phil and Dixie had joked about Sex and D&D for some time in Dragon Magazine, I can see Valar Project wanting to use the closer license. That would be fitting. And I think they exposed the dangers of the d20 license compared to the OGL.
 

I wonder since most support the OGL, what they thought of the Book of Erotic Fantasy?


I wasn't personally interested in the material so I had no opinion then nor now.


Now I never understood the HUGE backlash that hit the book, weather you liked it or not. However It was seen at the time as a 'Mistake' in the OGL that it was allowed to flourish...


Naw. It also seems like you are conflating (or suggesting the WotC legal team was/is conflating) the d20 STL with the OGL.
 


I think it says a lot that WotC felt comfortable publishing "The Book of Vile Darkness", but felt the need to change the d20 license to try to block someone else from publishing "The Book of Erotic Fantasy". But that's about our society's relative attitudes to violence and sex, which is an awfully big can of worms right there.

No kidding. The amount of positive attention The Book of Vile Darkness got, and gets, relative to, say, The Book of Exalted Deeds really honestly depresses me. TBVD is one book that's simply banned without discussion at my table.
 

No kidding. The amount of positive attention The Book of Vile Darkness got, and gets, relative to, say, The Book of Exalted Deeds really honestly depresses me. TBVD is one book that's simply banned without discussion at my table.
FWIW, using material is not an endorsement of the content.

For example, I ran a horror game in which the protagonist PC was tormented by his wife's cancer diagnosis and started hearing voices in his head. Would I say that playing the voices was enjoyable? No. But the story was really about the character overcoming this and being there for the wife. Which can't happen unless there's a challenge, the other side of things needs a voice.

I think it's important to take the negative side of things seriously.

The extent to which the BoVD does this varies, and as a pacifist I'm definitely against violence, but in a roleplaying game I think that kind of material is important and I wouldn't ban it.
 

FWIW, using material is not an endorsement of the content.
For example, I ran a horror game in which the protagonist PC was tormented by his wife's cancer diagnosis and started hearing voices in his head. Would I say that playing the voices was enjoyable? No. But the story was really about the character overcoming this and being there for the wife. Which can't happen unless there's a challenge, the other side of things needs a voice.

I think it's important to take the negative side of things seriously.

The extent to which the BoVD does this varies, and as a pacifist I'm definitely against violence, but in a roleplaying game I think that kind of material is important and I wouldn't ban it.

I don't play by "do as I say, not as I do".

That said, it's been (ten?) years since BoVD. I don't recall many details. I think some of the content was just gross (to me; I'm not a big fan of gore. No slasher films for me, thanks. YMMV.) , and most of it was just not something I wanted to explore or entertain in my campaign. I didn't want the door opened at all. That doesn't mean I want a campaign of sugar and spice, or that my campaigning is all positive and no negative. I've done dark things in my campaigns. I just felt that BoVD was really played up and marketed in a way to be the "it" thing, and I disagreed with that.

I'm not saying the BoVD should be banned, or it shouldn't have been made, or people shouldn't buy it. Do what you want. It just disappoints me.
 

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