This is the additional effect of Nudge the Scales:
In addition, you can mediate during your daily preparations
to place yourself on one side of the scales. Choose life or death.
If you align yourself with life, you are healed by vitality healing
effects, as normal for most living creatures; if you align yourself
with death, you gain the void healing ability, causing you to be
healed by void effects that restore Hit Points and any other
effects that restore Hit Points to undead creatures.
I might be overthinking how this works so I could use some confirmation how far off I am.
On a regular living creature, if you choose death, you remain living but gain void healing. You now heal and get targeted like how a Dhampir would. Easy.
On a Dhampir, a living creature with void healing, if you choose life, you remain living and you ignore your void healing ability. I know it doesn't say "remove" your void healing directly, but I'm sure it's meant to override it with the life alignment effect. You now heal and get targeted like every other full living creature would. Also easy.
On an undead, like a Skeleton or any Undead archetype, if you choose life, you remain undead but ignore void healing. You are undead but you ignore void healing, which I have no examples for.
Since most vitality healing effects requiring living targets, this really doesn't do much for the still undead PCs. Unless of course, does the line "If you align yourself with life, you are healed by vitality healing effects, as normal for most living creatures" qualify enough as 'specific overrides general' to allow the targeting and healing of an Undead PC with vitality healing effects?
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I think it's just "you can choose every day whether you are going to be healed by void or vitality".
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This ability makes perfect sense as long as you don't follow it literally. The intention to me is pretty clearly "choose if you count as a living creature or an undead creature for void/vitality effects". If you do that, and just assume that so long as you have vitality healing, you count as a living creature for those effects, everything is fine (ditto with void healing and counting as undead). This is kind of what people tend to do without thinking about it much, and if you don't think about it much, it works.
RAW, it is really messy. You have vitality healing, but nothing in this makes you count as living. You're still undead. So the Heal spell that should heal you can't because you're not a valid target for the healing effect. You don't take the damage its doing because you don't take Vitality damage anymore, but that's it.
Its also really wonky in the other direction: a living creature that uses this to get Void Healing is still alive, so things like Heals damage effect and the Vitalizing rune don't consider them a valid target at all and don't do anything. A LOT of effects that do vitality damage specifically say "if the target is undead", which you're not.
The problem is really on those other things and how they limit targeting to living/undead creatures, instead of "creatures with vitality/void healing".
My advice: don't run this RAW, much like how no one ran Arcane Cascade RAW for years.
Its also really wonky in the other direction: a living creature that uses this to get Void Healing is still alive, so things like Heals damage effect and the Vitalizing rune don't consider them a valid target at all and don't do anything. A LOT of effects that do vitality damage specifically say "if the target is undead", which you're not.
The problem is really on those other things and how they limit targeting to living/undead creatures, instead of "creatures with vitality/void healing".
My advice: don't run this RAW, much like how no one ran Arcane Cascade RAW for years.
Now that you mention it, since the remaster, several things that target undead has also added the line “or otherwise has void healing.” It’s not on everything, but I think it’s on enough that it’s heavily implied that’s a given.
And like you said, having vitality/void healing making you count as living/undead respectively despite what you actually are makes everything work smoothly. Things that have effects for both living and undead like Heal and Harm also become unecessarily difficult, otherwise. I mean, that’s how most of us rule for Dhampirs.
Thanks!