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Message: <blockquote data-quote="TwinBahamut" data-source="post: 5821387" data-attributes="member: 32536">I'm not a fan of using Medusa's instant death petrification as a standard for D&D. Really, it makes for a terrible game experience. Either you don't know it's coming, at which point you open a door, Medusa turns around, and everyone is petrified, or you do know it is coming and everyone is 100% prepared to deal with it with little risk. I don't like things that are that binary in games. There are times where following myth just doesn't lead to a fun game, and having a fun game is far more important than blind loyalty to myth. It's not like you get a free Pegasus and instant-death medusa head item every time you kill a medusa in D&D, after all...Anyways, I'm mostly of the opinion that, if you have to have save-or-die in the game, then it should not be an easy shortcut around the game's normal death mechanics. Casting an instant death spell should not be easier than dealing a lot of HP damage (3E got this so wrong...). At the very least, it should be roughly equivalent in effectiveness and survivability to some other risk of death. For example, it is mostly fair for a 4E death effect to kill in three failed saves, because a character dying from HP damage will die in three failed saves. Requiring any fewer number of saves for an instant death effect just messes up game balance pointlessly.</blockquote>