I disagree. The answer should be "as much as is needed." I don't need a full page for a Dog or a Bear. Whereas I could use a good article-sized entry for mind flayers if the material was useful and evocative.
Just so. I completely agree with Vyvyan, here.
Mind Flayers? Yeah. Absolutely! They are iconic D&D. They are humanoid. They have a society. Language. Racial ties and attitudes. Possibly religion. They have a
Culture. Not every critter in the MM does or needs this. They absolutely are entitled to a page, possibly more (though I'd prefer no more than a spread/2 pages).
Please, kind ENworlders, do keep in mind, I come at this from a Layout Editor/Graphic Designer with many years of publishing experience position as much as an avid fan/player/DM of D&D with a great love of the hobby. The greatest monster book in the world could be 1,000 pages long [maybe more!] and give us
all everything we'd ever want about every possible monster.
This is simply, unfortunate but true, not possible in printed material...decisions must be made. Editing and layout design are jobs for a reason. Even online material, who among you have hours and hours to pour through...or, nowadays,
want to pour through scrolling and scrolling and scrolling to get all of that information in?
D&D [or
any RPG, for that matter] needs to be a coherent rules/information
set...a system with enough info to give us the
tools, the
parameters, we need to make things work. They can not, possibly, give us
everything, every possible permutation, of what can
potentially happen in game.
It simply can't be done in an affordable way, whether for money or time. I want things as evocative as possible. I also look at these things and think, "this won't work in a printed book"...and possibly, "this won't work in a PDF or website," either. Those are the, again, unfortunate, constraints of reality and the business-side of the hobby we all love.