Quote Originally Posted by Dualight View Post
My take on it is that the reason death saves get skipped is to streamline combat. once a monster is reduced to 0, the players will move to finish it off, wasting time that could have been spent on the scene, or instead the DM will have to keep dealing with the repercussions of the players not finishing their enemies off, which increases the DM's workload massively for often minimal payoff.
Yeah that's why I skip it. It's to keep things moving. Death saves for enemy NPCs only crops up for me when the enemy is particularly important, or the enemy force has healing capabilities - they can Healing Word a downed person just as much as the players can.

Strictly, the streamlining does make it easier on players than giving death saves to everyone all the time. The chance of a nat 20, and having to spend attacks/actions to finish them would give those still standing more turns to live.

But if I want things to be more dangerous it's probably easier to just toss another dice of damage on every creature than do death saves.