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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Alzrius" data-source="post: 6295858" data-attributes="member: 8461">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, <a href="http://www.rpgnow.com/product/57961/Sisters-of-Rapture-OGL-Edition" target="_blank">Sisters of Rapture</a> (disclaimer; I collaborated on this book).As for the second way of looking at the question...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.</blockquote>

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