Ruin Explorer
Legend
That you're admitting my claim "may hold true for some games" means your claim of "always" is false. There's no more to it. So that's fine.Yeah, I claim it's always possible. Again, because make-believe in a fantasy world. It's a skill.
Your claim may hold true for some games, but not all, since you can't claim to know the quality of all games. One doesn't even need to worry about whether a monster has any "in-combat" way to determine if a PC is unconscious or actually dead. It doesn't really matter. The ghoul feasts. The iced up frost giant tweaks. The berserker goes berserk. The cultist pulls out entrails in the name of their horrible godling. And on and on.
To be clear, I have never claimed that all enemies should always attack downed PCs. Only that they could and that one can establish why as needed.
And any attacking of downed PCs where only PCs who are downed, not dead, are attacked is going to involve metagaming. I mean, why would the berserker stop hacking at the PC because the PC was no longer making death saves? Why would he not hack at an already-dead PC? Metagaming is why. Otherwise he'd keep hacking for an indefinite period, maybe a few seconds more, maybe until his axe breaks - or he might get bored of hacking before he's done. You can put a dress on metagaming by saying why in-fiction, but it's still metagaming when you rely on attacking downed targets to delete death saves and stop as soon as you have. Why would the ghoul stop feasting? Metagaming. But in fiction, ghouls often wouldn't stop when someone was dead, they'd keep going. Before you start claiming the players do the same, they actually can't, because they don't know if monsters have secret rules that let them get back up. They have to guess, and often make mistakes. Whereas with death saves, it's pure, known metagaming, because the DM tracks that - even if the PCs hid it, it's a matter of counting to 3.