Quote Originally Posted by Catullus64 View Post
I'll see your analogy and raise you another. A cookbook with lots and lots of good recipes is a good cookbook. A cookbook the bulk of which is dedicated to describing ingredients is not.

Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft, a book I have myriad problems with, was actually trending in the right direction with its writeups on horror genres, clumsy though many of them were. The 'flavors of fantasy' section in the DMG, which tries something similar, is well due some reinforcement, and I hope it gets new attention in the 2024 re-works of the core rulebook.
I don't agree with that analogy, because it assumes that the rules are a cookbook, not an ingredients list.... they are the fully stocked kitchen, which the cook will use to create a dish.

The cookbook was inside you all along. Do you want robots? Sprinkle in some warforged. How about dragon people with boobs? Add a dash of dragonborn. Don't want your dragon people to have boobs? Take out the boobs.