This approach disappoints me. Not saying you are wrong. I don’t know. But I think it’s a mistake to make every setting a kitchen sink. I want dark age settings like after the fall of Camelot, and many others. And d&d can do them well.
Think of it this way:
In a grim and gritty video game or noir film, choosing to use only black and white film is often an excellent stylistic choice. Black and white (and shades of grey) communicates something different from what full color would.
Schindler's List, for example, is almost totally B&W...except for the little girl with the red coat, which is used for devastating dramatic effect.
But...if you ONLY had black-and-white film, you couldn't have done
Schindler's List. You couldn't have had a film that had color in just one
part, because proper black-and-white film lacks the ability to express color of any kind.
Now, this analogy is imperfect. It's not physically
impossible for us to add more colors to our crayon box as RPG designers, if we need them. Thri-kreen, for instance, were added to
Dark Sun, and are well-loved within that context. However, it is
not true to say that adding colors after the fact is just as easy as adding them in advance. It's usually a (relatively) bigger effort, because when you're designing a setting, you need to communicate as much as you can about its specifics. A core rulebook, on the other hand, is...well, a core,
intended to be commonly-shared amongst all products that branch out from it. It's not meant to articulate something specific, but rather meant to facilitate, as far as you reasonably can, whatever people
might want to do with that core.
And that's why it's generally a bad thing to have an ultra-ultra simple core, in terms of option diversity. Not because simplicity is bad--it's not, it's often a virtue. Not because complexity is an unalloyed good, far from it, intricate and extensive things are often confusing, or may even push prospective players away. Instead, it's because an ultra-ultra simple core
supports fewer subsequent things. Those subsequent things have to do a lot more heavy lifting, which makes them harder and more expensive to make, which makes people produce fewer of them.
Instead of offering a super narrowly-tailored, hyper-focused core, it is
generally useful,
within the bounds of reason, to offer a broadly-tailored core, one that supports a wide variety of preferences and tastes as much as possible. That way,
when people want a more focused subset, it's...literally just as easy as saying "nope, that option isn't found here. Sorry!"
This is why I am such a strong advocate of having lots of options....and then giving really clear, straightforward explanations of what you can DO with those options, how you can BUILD certain themes or feels or narratives by selectively picking only a portion of those options.
Dark Sun excises several races, e.g. there are no dwarves, only muls, aka half-dwarves, among several other exterminated races; and the gods do not answer prayers, so classes dependent on Divine magic
don't exist. Even 4e, the edition where "everything is core," adhered to this, and it did NOT result in riots and people bellyaching about how they couldn't play an Avenger or the like--because people understood that
Dark Sun offered a restricted subset in order to pursue a particular flavor of play. (Further,
Dark Sun 4e maintained the high lethality and brutal environmental conditions of previous editions: combats are MEAN, and survival is NOT guaranteed.)
By giving people a diverse palette, and then giving them
advice on how to restrict that palette in order to articulate certain themes or ideas, you empower DMs and players alike to make the game their own. (Ideally, you'd offer advice on how to
expand it too, but that's much more complicated.) When you give them a restricted palette to begin with and then say "well if you want something else, YOU figure it out," you're leaving people high and dry. Instead of respecting their creative freedom, you're leaving them to fend for themselves--because, as noted, most books
don't include advice on HOW to expand the palette of options, because that's a difficult affair that requires a lot more testing and reviewing than
restricting the palette requires.
Again, this is NOT to say that we ABSOLUTELY HAVE to cram every single option anyone could ever think of into the core. That's not feasible. The designers must always make decisions about what is worth including, and sometimes, that's going to mean that even a reasonably-popular option doesn't get covered early on. That's a fact of life, and while it sucks, accepting it is part of learning how to make the best products you can. That's why it's so important, whenever possible, to support
both restricting
and expanding the palette of options (be they races, classes, backgrounds, whatever), so that DMs and players alike have the power to choose their own worlds, their own experiences.
TL;DR:
I'm not saying we must make
settings kitchen sinks. I'm saying that the
core books need to
support kitchen sinks, because kitchen sink is a valid, and popular, setting motif. That means the core books gotta have a lot of races and a lot of classes. But they should advise players and DMs how to trim down (and, ideally, how to add onto) those lists, to produce desired themes/ideas.
Individual published settings SHOULD pick and choose options. That should
always be an important part of setting design. Having lots of core races (and classes) does not imply that they
must appear in
every setting, only that they
can appear in
any setting, if the setting-writer chooses.
Elves exist, but not as a PC race.
