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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8296575" data-attributes="member: 18">From a purely mechanical perspective, it's in large part about positioning and initiative order, as well as who else is in the party. It also matters as to whether people are attacking downed targets.For example, if a Warlock is about to go down, and his turn was coming up soon (before, say, the Cleric), then if you don't prevent the damage, you miss a round of damage that he could have done, because even if the Cleric then gets him back up, he's not up until his next turn, having missed one.If a Fighter is in combat and goes down, and the enemies get to go, you have a couple of problems - firstly, they can now safely move away from him with no threat of Opportunity Attack. Secondly, they can attack him if he's downed, with Advantage (weirdly RAW in 5E I think you keep your DEX bonus whilst unconscious lol), and get auto-crits (so two death saves removed - thus two hits kills him). Even if the Cleric gets him back up before its his turn, if the monsters have moved away, he has to spend his move getting up from prone, so won't be able to go after them, so you likely lose his DPR this round.There will be some corner-case situations where it would be better to let someone go down and just do the extra damage (particularly if there is only a single opponent left), but I think if you are looking at it in terms of 5E mechanics, the general rule-of-thumb would be - prevent people getting downed wherever possible, because the odds are good it'll get you at least an extra round of DPR out of them, and you may even save their life (esp. if they're melees).</blockquote>

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