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So here's the scenario. In one of my tabletop games I'm running, we have a cleric. A discussion came up where they encountered a large number of foes, and while they were dropping them into negative HP, they weren't dead. During this combat the cleric channeled a couple times to heal the party. And while he did have selective channeling, he targeted conscious foes to omit. Afterwards during our discussion I mentioned me not bringing them back up, and after abit I stated that next time I would start keeping track.
So I did. When the cleric channeled, I had been keeping track of the enemies, rolling stabilization checks and all that, and when the cleric channeled, it brought up four of the previously defeated foes. After a short discussion, I let him rescind the action and we played it out.
Now here's where my question is. How do other groups handle these situations? While it seems more in-line with the rules to keep track of them, here's the problems I encountered.
1) Keeping track of the foes was abit more time consuming on their actions. It did eventually involved 23 enemy combatants (attacking in waves), where I had to note where they were at HP, roll stabilization checks, etc.
2) Keeping track of positions. Normally we remove a defeated foe from the board, but I was keeping track of their positions in my notes so I knew where they were at. This also consumed time, and the players felt it was unfair since while they didn't know who was alive/dead without checks, they could at least figure out where the bodies were.
Between both of those it felt like it overcomplicated the game. So curious of other people's opinions.
You can handwave it to be at 0 NPCs are dead dead or keep the difficult decision on the Cleric to potentially awaken the previously unconcious bad guys.
I think that if he heals them, they should be up and at em. It's the major drawback of a good bomb.
Keep track of those that blew past the dead dead threshold and remove the figs. or replace with a token to show they are well and truly dead? or just mark them on your tracking sheet. Easier than making stabilization rolls for that many folks, take the negative HP and subtract 2 more (avg two turns to make stabilize checks at 10+) then leave them at that. (Maybe only one if they have a good CON.)
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A lot of GMs consider most generic NPCs to be dead if they go past 0 hit points, and only keep track for "named" NPCs, which cuts down on tracking significantly.
Then again, unless you are really making things ugly for your players, 23 enemies is going to consist mainly of mooks, and not be worth the bother of tracking anyhow.
I usually keep track of them, changing 'killing squares' as dificult terrain (blood, gore and inconvenient placed corpses are a pain), ofcourse they aren't always dead, marking them down as difficult terrain gives them a hint of their location at least.
That said the cleric usually doesn't channel in combat, in part I am sure because he lacks selective channel.
Our group normally plays 0 HP as dead for the majority of non story critical NPC's and creatures and all undead.
Major NPC's or villians are tracked as characters.
That said, when we have in combat Channeling, the ref will usally just roll a D6 for each fallen foe in the area. If she rolls a 1 or a 2 then they get back up with HP's equal to the (amount channeled)-5.
It is a quick an dirty way of making there be repercussions for channeling in battle without selective channel without it being lethal for the party.