Failed.Bard wrote...
I could see it useful at times to be able to know what the roll is, if you wanted to have an effect scale based on how badly they failed the roll, for example.
Exactly. I am toying around with a rewrite of our death magic spells and effects which requires knowing how badly something failed a roll. What I want to get around is how our death magic becomes essentially useless at higher levels, because we allow auto-fail on 1s, and every hard NPC must be death immune or risk being easily deafeated by a finger of death spamming sorceror.
The stance I am taking is that death magic attempts to rend the soul from the body, a traumatic event that causes considerable pain (in the form of damage). However, incomplete rending of the soul can and does occur - represtented by a target being damaged by the spell, but living thru it. Also, lower hitdice (or caster level, I haven't entirely decided yet) will suffer penalties as they attempt to rend the souls of stronger opponents. The actual roll they make in conjunction with the other factors scales the base spell damage up or down.
I am granting a bonus for death immunity, which is easy to check for, and accounting for the hit dice difference between the caster and targets, their fort save, and d20 roll, but I don't see how to account for item bonuses to death magic.