Half-Damage Saves

[Willot]

In Pathfinder 3.5 How hard would it be to change the rulesets so a Half-damage is the result of a "Save" (where applicable). The Save for half damage crops up alot for spells.

[Trenloe]

Currently, targets that make their save are removed (no longer targeted) and those that fail are kept targeted so that you can apply full damage to those that fail - then manually apply half-damage to those that made their save.

To do what you're asking - have another level of targeting to allow half-damage when a save is successfully made would require a fundamental change to the targeting system (i.e. have 2 levels of targeting) or a major rewrite to the spell casting subsystem. But, what happens to characters that have the evasion feat (take no damage when a save is made) as there is no 100% sure way to identify if a PC or NPC has the evasion feat because this relies on the feat being entered in freeform and so can be entered a lot of different ways - or even missed off PC character sheets altogether.

At the moment the flexibility is there to cater for both half-damage and no-damage on a successful save - "flexibility" meaning you manually check if a target has evasion and manually apply half damage if appropriate. Whereas the portion of the spell casting process that can be fully automated (full damage when a save is failed) is there.