[RPG] Do enemies have the same rules for death as PCs

You have the basic idea down right.

• At 0 hit points the character is disabled, but the mechanics term is staggered though worse than normal as they can take a move action, but cannot take a standard without taking a point of damage and therefore begin dying.

  • If a character attempts to heal themselves through a standard action, they take the point of damage at the same time as they're healed.

• You're dying until your negative hit points equal to your Constitution score (your chart is confused on this point, but I think you're giving an extra point)

• Your final assumption is correct on how things work with healing or without. .

  • The simple fact is this rarely comes up in games. It requires a near total party kill with no magical healing in sight (since magical healing negates several of rolls automatically).

Yes, 8 kobolds all going at once can be very swingy at low levels. To help this, don't roll for their damage - just use the average damage number.

I break monsters up into groups of three to five, to avoid this problem.

For example, you could have two groups of three kobolds. Roll initiative separately for each group.

That way you might get something like: PC1, then kobolds, then PC2, then PC3, then kobolds, then PC4.

For each combat, I write the combatants down on a scrap piece of paper, from first to last, along with initiative rolls. My minis are all coloured and numbered (OK, they are cardboard cutouts, but I'm calling them minis :-). So, I might have written down "21: Alice, 18: Kobolds red, blue, green, 16: Bob, 15: Eve, 14: Kobold Purple, Black, White, 9: Trent". I use this piece of paper to track the combat - HP, status effects and so on.

At higher levels there are abilities that really shine when players win initiative (Rogue Assassin archetype, for example). If monsters always go on initiative 10 then these abilities can become quite overpowering.

Other alternatives include the variant initiative rules in the DMG and "popcorn initative" as described by AngryDM (warning, bad language and strong attitude).