i will now explain myself https://twitter.com/DailyDael/status/1388432136567353344

Unconsciousness (unconscious here meaning "not conscious") and 0hp are directly correlative states. If you hit 0hp you fall unconscious. Falling unconscious can also drop you to 0hp, as with suffocation. It makes sense that the two are linked.

Death saves are only linked to 0hp. "Whenever you start your turn with 0 hit points, you must make a [death] saving throw".

Unless you're stable.

So then unconsciousness doesn't require death saves, unconsciousness and 0hp does, but unconsciousness and 0hp and stable doesn't.

The system stacks the conditions on top of each other like qualitative floating modifiers in order, essentially, to handle the difference between sleep & dying. Sleep isn't its own condition, eg. the Sleep spell references standard unconsciousness with the addendum you can wake.

It works, I'm not arguing it doesn't, but I do wonder if it might be simpler to be either conscious or unconscious. When you hit 0hp you are no longer awake, and I posit that when you aren't awake, maybe you should have 0hp. A link that isn't conditional.

A person stabbed in their sleep is as likely to die as a person stabbed to unconsciousness on the battlefield. If something would cause your character to reduce their current HP but they have none, they are now dying and must make death saves.

Distinct states of being.

For clarity, this is just a musing on the nature of abstraction. I'm not saying this is how the system should work, that this is how you should run it, or even that I would run it this way.

I am a genius though and Awake Points is definitely my legacy.