The Crimson Binome
Hero
Does your DM not narrate taking 60 damage differently from taking 30 damage? (Is there no difference between being hit by an ogre's club, or a titan's maul?) Whatever the in-game reality is which corresponds to the saving throw, it seems like there's a pretty big difference between success and failure, or else it wouldn't have such vastly different consequences.No not really - in the case of observing a fireball, you will see all (except maybe for creatures with damage immunity=fire, who may just stand and laugh at you) creatures in the AOE fall, dive, roll, hold up shields, etc. (whatever the narrative flavour of 'roll a saving throw' is for them) but you would not necessarily know how successful those saving throws have been, or whether some had also benefitted from evasion, or fire resistance or whatnot. Your 6 seconds of observation would be, whoosh, bang, lots of scrabbling and burning, some are still on their feet, others aren't getting up. You may be able to see that someone has been totally unaffected [evasion success, immunity] but that's about it.
I mean, when the DM is describing the effects of the spell, I can't imagine them describing it in such a way that it isn't obvious as to which ones saved and which ones failed. Of course, the description of damage is something which is expected to vary between tables, so maybe your DM just does that differently.
If you wanted to say that only creatures looking in the direction of the explosion, and paying a certain amount of attention, could possibly determine whether any particular target was able to save from a spell; then you would need some way of tracking which creatures were able to do so. If you instead say that everyone notices, or that nobody could possibly notice, then you wouldn't need any mechanic to track that sort of thing.I don't see how it adds to the bookkeeping though, the saves get rolled, damaged is applied, the narration is 'boom' [or whatever], next action.
It's kind of like the rules for hiding in combat, which state that you can't hide if anyone can possibly see you, because everyone is constantly looking in every direction when they're in combat -- because otherwise we would have to track facing for every combatant during every round, and that would be too annoying.