What I find interesting is the >intent< and >purpose< behind lack of descriptive content in the SRD.
It seems that a primary purpose of the SRD is to provide a common gaming platform for independant publishers and game developers to build on. In particular, the SRD is the only legal way for independant adventure publishers to legally create and publish adventures using "D&D" content.
This is obviously good for WotC (and has been extremely successful), since the entire genre is more fully developed, perhaps with more gaming material than WotC themselves have the time and resources to develop.
The big flaw though, as demonstrated by the Illithiad example, is that publishers can't legally, typically, do this. From a roleplaying point of view, as opposed to a pure game mechanics point of view, the important information is not available, and probably illegal to reproduce from the MM (or even build on), in a published adventure.
Does WotC really want to encourage (as one of many, many possible examples), a situation where there are disparate views on what an Illithiad is - psychologically, culturally, and visually completely different according to whose published adventure you use (with only similar statblocks)? This seems to encourage a notion that roleplaying is reduced to statblock mechanics. A very sad notion.
So, whilst WotC have put in excellent pressure for players to purchase the monster manual for playing purchased adventures, they've also made it extremely difficult for publishers to actually use those creatures legally in published adventures.
Does there perhaps need to be a new license mechanic where somehow a publisher >can< use the SRD monsters in a common roleplaying fashion?
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