Male nipples they’re cool with, but they don’t want any “covered” D20 products to show female nipples. They’ve amended their D20 guidelines to include the following quality standards:
Sexual Themes - Sexual situations—including abuse and pornography—may not appear graphically in art or text. When depicting the human form—or creatures possessing humaniform features—gratuitous nudity, the depiction of genitalia, bare female nipples, and sexual or bathroom activity is not acceptable. While sensuality and sexuality may appear in a Covered Product, it must not be the focus nor can it be salacious in nature.
On the nipple subject, I was watching Joe Schmoe the other day, and they went for blockyship (you know what I’m talking about, but I just invented that word) on some nipples. Some guy’s nipples. Ok, some guy’s fat-man-breasts.
Just thought I’d share while we were talking about nipples and lack thereof. I think its very sad when teenagers are forced to buy seperate books of Boris Vallejo for their fantasy women action.
Someone was going to put out a the “Book of Erotic Fantasy” using the D20 rules. WOTC quickly changed the D20 license so they couldn’t do it. It’s now going to come out under the Open Gaming License. I saw it at GenCon, and it has lots of ladies nipples.
It seems that the idea that the human body is not obscene or pornographic still has along way to go. Someone should ask WotC if they think God or Mother Nature or whoever is a pornographer.
I assume that the ban on female nipples only applies to human female nipples, after all where would D&D be if you can’t kill cows to level-up?
I used to go to gaming & science fiction conventions all the time. Then, at Worldcon, I made the mistake of going to the gaming area. I encountered a large number of people that had taken the erotic and sensual aspects of RPGs far, far, far into creepy and gross instead*. I never went to another con again. If that’s the crowd that WoTC is trying to shut down, then I’m with WoTC.
*OK, you want an example. How about the guy who would only play nude female characters that were child murderers? He also had a stack of hardcore porn magazines that he used to trace the portraits for his character sheets. I didn’t have the courage to ask why he needed to bring 50+ magazines with him to the gaming area. Time and a place, man, time and a place.
Oh, I’m not denying that there are some creepy people around, or denying WotC their right not to be associated with pornography, it’s just the idea of regarding female nipples in themselves as pornographic that I find amusing and a little hypocritical, particularly in a game where women are frequently portrayed with unrealistically large and gravity defying breasts.
Geez, is this D&D we’re talking about? Is this WoTC we’re talking about? I mean, even the first little fawn-colored original D&D booklets had some badly penned succubus as an illo… and WoTC is the company that the famous Salon article was written about… I guess Hasbro is kind of stodgy, though.
I guess they’re gonna have to change all that great Larry Elmore art :)
WOTC back in the early explosion of MTG also changed some of the art on the cards to remove any heavily influenced Satanic or similar influences - can’t remember the card in particular (Demonic Horde or Summoning or something like that, I think I have it someplace) where they removed a rather large pentagram.
Stuff like that they easily caved in to the parents, so I’m not entirely surprised they’d so again for nipplage.
WOTC back in the early explosion of MTG also changed some of the art on the cards to remove any heavily influenced Satanic or similar influences - can’t remember the card in particular (Demonic Horde or Summoning or something like that, I think I have it someplace) where they removed a rather large pentagram.
the card with the pentagram was “unholy strength”.
Phil Foglio is phfunny. His card game XXXenophile would be a pretty sad thing if it wasn’t for his illos and humor. Actually, it’s a pretty sad thing as it is, but it’s still amusing to flip through the deck…
