Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Combat deadsafes - is it "broken"?

So, Death saves are a mechanic in the PnP, yes, however, the fact that you get them and no-one else does is not - it's only suggested as a common practice because of practicality.

If the group of goblins don't have a healer, amongst them (they usually don't), and the party is aiming to kill them, then there's no point in giving the goblins death saves, since the only thing it will do is slow down the game and make it more tedious. In the PnP, it's a practicality of necessity for paying an enjoyable game that doesn't endlessly get bogged down in functionally pointless minutia. In a video-game situation, that is, if anything, even more important. I DO think that NPCs should get death saves as well, but it's wise that our enemies don't.

That said, death saves are, in fact, NOT working properly or reliably in the game at the moment, and if they were, death-tanking would be far less viable.

Whenever a creature runs up to a down body and successfully hits it, you should be automatically losing two death save failures; that means that you're one failure on your turn form being dead, or one second tap away from it...
This isn't happening at the moment. Sometimes being hit while downed doesn't add any additional failures at all, sometimes it adds one. In most situations where people have reported death-tanking like that, it would have just resulted in a very dead party member, and potentially a wipe shortly afterwards, if the saves were working properly.

The other issue is that traumatic death also isn't in or working, as you bring up: if I have 8 hit points, and take 10 damage from an attack, I go down; that's fine. If someone raises me to 1 hit point, and then I take 9 damage from something else - I DIE outright. At least in 5e, that's an important mechanic, especially at low levels, to help curtail exactly this sort of drop-and-pop playing. By the normal rules, if you take damage that would drop you to a number equal to or greater than your hit point maximum below zero, then instead of dropping to zero, you just die from extreme damage, no saves.