I must say i am rather amused how concerned people are about simulating the gaze of a Medusa realistically in a game where any fighter can ignore being threatened with a Knife and no trained warrior will ever die from falling of a horse.
D&D always made huge concession to fun ignoring realism in areas where our real life experience actually tells us what should happen.
But apparently making those concessions to the "realism" of a Medusa is a problem even though there is no real Medusa.
You have some insightful posts, so I thought I'd respond to one. Simulation is a concern for some players, but it isn't the be and and end all either. In the past the game did clip off extraordinarily rare odds in its rolls. When games tried to put them back in, like with exploding damage rolls (cumulative max results keep rolling), they invariably limited how long PCs could adventure before the odds caught up to them too, not just dealing it out to the enemy. It would be unheard of for anyone to live to old age from peasant living alone, much less the dangerous business of adventuring (though maybe some prefer that in their games, I don't).
However, while I do think the game makes concessions in some places to enable simplicity behind the screen, it can do a fair job of simulating stuff like combat too. A single knife can kill pretty much any creature when not actively defended against. A fall from a horse is 1d6 and a few poor HP rolls early on even for a Fighter means a 10' fall can still drop someone below zero. -10 (a glaring PC-only rule) obviously keeps PCs alive when they would more commonly die due to injury. Will HPs be dropped? Maybe we'll get multiple options with the benefits and drawbacks of each, who knows? But some level of abstraction will live on.
My main point is, interesting character challenges should lead to interesting player strategies. Medusa Save or Turn to Stone is pretty classic. It involves shared eye contact, so both creatures must be able to see and have direct line of sight on the other, no cover, no blindfolds, nada. It means arc of vision is accounted for, for humanoids normally 180°, and facing by creatures pointed at each other in that arc. That stuff isn't in the game anymore. They may have never been in many people's games, but bizarre outcomes due to the rules arise like hydra heads needing to be cut off (yeah I went there) when the rules can't account for corner cases.
I'd prefer to see players think up ideas like "we're better off negotiating here; what do we have to offer?" or "maybe we could send the monk in blindfolded? Let's test that out first like this..." Hack & Slash play really was about charging in and smacking stuff with one's sword until everything fell. It used to be the odds were on average 50% to do that (so in no one's favor). Changing the odds by thinking outside the box was how we changed that. And IMO creative thinking is really what these glass cannons promote. They're not about ruining the players fun or exiling them from the game table randomly. And I'd rather not see made popular the opinion that 'anything not solely designed for attrition-based play is the problem.' I say we need more diversity of rules, not less. These are the times when the rules need to step in and promote more interesting game play, not less.
I'm not Simulation or Nothing. What I see is a design challenge that can be overcome creatively and, if done well, could really amaze people. Rather than bemoaning these difficulties and avoiding them by changing the fiction, why don't we think of means that highlight their uniqueness and really push the players to get creative too?
