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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Al" data-source="post: 1136256" data-attributes="member: 2486">What many people forget is the prevalence of battlefield healing magics, which make a downed opponent potentially at least as dangerous (or more, if he was more dangerous standing) than his active colleagues.In light of this, any villain (and even neutral pragmatic 'heroes') fighting against any group with access to significant field healing magic (which means practically any PC or NPC group and many outsiders) should make a practice of ensuring that downed foes are dead before moving on to another foe.  There is nothing more demoralising than seeing a Heal spell take your archnemesis wizard from -8 to full health.  However, it's not necessarily advisable (or necessary) to coup de grace.  Unless you do feeble base damage or face an obscene AC (which is going to have to be truly obscene given the effective Dex 0 on a prone opponent) you are better off simply making another attack, which is quite likely to finish them off, without drawing AoOs and without wasting a full round.  Another straight attack or equivalent is fine- the best strategic use of Cleave, for example, is often on the opponent you've just downed... <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />  Spellcasters may instead simply wish to ensure that any downed bodies are within the area of effect of their next fireball...with no Reflex save, it's almost a dead-cert goner.</blockquote>

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