Hi all, I'm interested to see if "forgoing" a roll is relevant for certain skills such as Mortal Healing.
Even in the worst circumstances, you can perform basic tasks. Choose a skill you’re trained in. You can forgo rolling a skill check for that skill to instead receive a result of 10 + your proficiency bonus (do not apply any other bonuses, penalties, or modifiers).
You grant greater healing when the gods don’t interfere. When you roll a success to Treat Wounds for a creature that hasn’t regained Hit Points from divine magic in the past 24 hours, you get a critical success on your check instead and restore the corresponding amount of Hit Points.
So at first look Assurance tells you that you "forgo rolling a skill check". and Mortal healing says "When you roll a success". I want to assume the wording is significant rather than something like "when you get a success to treat wounds..." which would've been more clear as inclusive.
When I look at the steps of a Check I see:
1. Roll a d20 and identify the modifiers, bonuses, and penalties that apply.
2. Calculate the result.
3. Compare the result to the difficulty class (DC).
4. Determine the degree of success and the effect.
So I understand with Assurance I skip step 1 and it then gives me the result which is step 2. When we get to steps 3 and 4 -- Does something like Mortal Healing still care about whether or not you rolled or used assurance?
Looking further at step 4 it specifically adds
Some other abilities can change the degree of success for rolls you get. When resolving the effect of an ability that changes your degree of success, always apply the adjustment from a natural 20 or natural 1 before anything else.
So here it talks about abilities that change the degrees of success for rolls. Is that intentionally not touching on something like assurance where you did not "roll"? Or does something like "Mortal Healing" use the wording "When you roll a success" so that this paragraph is relevant and you apply the nat20 or nat1 before anything else in all the cases you might treat wounds without assurance?
As it stands currently I haven't found clear guidance one way or another whether or not the phrasing "when you roll a success" cares whether or not Assurance was used, or if it is just standardization of verbiage to apply the nat20/nat1 adjustments first. Currently I'm expecting table variance but would appreciate if anyone has clear more guidance/ruling one way or another.
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Does something like Mortal Healing still care about whether or not you rolled or used assurance?
No.
You can even get a Critical Failure or Critical Success with Assurance.
Why did you select Mortal Healing, specifically, for your question? I count dozens of instances where this language comes up.
It seems to me that the most sensible interpretation is that Assurance auto-fills Step 2, and then you simply move on to Steps 3-4 (as you suggested).
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Hi all, I'm interested to see if "forgoing" a roll is relevant for certain skills such as Mortal Healing.
Even in the worst circumstances, you can perform basic tasks. Choose a skill you’re trained in. You can forgo rolling a skill check for that skill to instead receive a result of 10 + your proficiency bonus (do not apply any other bonuses, penalties, or modifiers).You grant greater healing when the gods don’t interfere. When you roll a success to Treat Wounds for a creature that hasn’t regained Hit Points from divine magic in the past 24 hours, you get a critical success on your check instead and restore the corresponding amount of Hit Points.
I'm glad someone else had this question.
I think that Mortal Healing works even when used alongside Assurance. So the "When you roll a success" part of Mortal Healing should be read as "When you get a success".
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They use the word "Roll" instead of the word "Get" because the word "Get" can be problematic with abilities that modify more than one Tier. They made this clear with the Errata.
Changes to Greater Juggernaut, Greater Resolve,
Improved Evasion, and Third Path to Perfection
All four of these abilities grant a two-tier benefit on a failed
saving throw of the specified type, but (as always) no ability
will ever change your degree of success by more than one
step. To clarify, we’re making the following clarification to
all four abilities. Change the beginning of the last sentence
from “When you fail” the listed saving throw to “When
you roll a failure on” the listed saving throw.
Greater Juggernaut 13th
You have a stalwart physiology. Your proficiency rank
for Fortitude saves increases to legendary. When you roll
a critical failure on a Fortitude save, you get a failure
instead. When you fail a Fortitude save against an effect
that deals damage, you halve the damage you take.
Using the word "Get" makes people think that abilities like Greater Juggernaut can turn a Critical Failure into a Failure with half damage, so they use the word "Roll" to make it clear that it's modifying the original result, not the modified result. Whether or not you actually rolled dice is not relevant.
Mortal Healing doesn't have that issue, but I would assume uses the same wording for consistency.
So far this thread involves a lot of "I think when they wrote roll, they didn't mean roll". As written, Mortal Healing requires a roll, and Assurance doesn't involve a roll. Has there been any official confirmation that the feat should not be used as written?
Assurance guarantees a result of success for a DC 15 trained Treat Wounds check, as long as the character has a proficiency modifier of +5. If Mortal Healing were to apply to Treat Wounds checks using Assurance, it would guarantee a critical success instead. On a roll of 1d20+5 for a DC 15 Treat Wounds check using Mortal Healing you'd have a chance of 1/20 crit fails, 8/20 fails, and 11/20 crit successes. Now, if you modify the wording of Mortal Healing to allow it to be used with Assurance, you turn those crit fails and fails into crit successes.
While not quite the same that seems extremely close to Aratorin's quote from the published Errata that no ability will ever change your degree of success by more than one step.
I see absolutely no reason to use different rules for Mortal Healing than what is written. If the authors had intended it otherwise, they'll likely publish a correction at some point to clarify. But until then, Mortal Healing only affects the result of a roll, Assurance explicitly foregoes that roll, so the combination of the two doesn't work.
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Assurance guarantees a result of success for a DC 15 trained Treat Wounds check, as long as the character has a proficiency modifier of +5. If Mortal Healing were to apply to Treat Wounds checks using Assurance, it would guarantee a critical success instead. On a roll of 1d20+5 for a DC 15 Treat Wounds check using Mortal Healing you'd have a chance of 1/20 crit fails, 8/20 fails, and 11/20 crit successes. Now, if you modify the wording of Mortal Healing to allow it to be used with Assurance, you turn those crit fails and fails into crit successes.
While not quite the same that seems extremely close to Aratorin's quote from the published Errata that no ability will ever change your degree of success by more than one step.
I must be missing some important part of your argument- Assurance prevents you rolling a Critical Failure by guaranteeing a Success without rolling. That is two steps by the logic you are using.
I must be missing some important part of your argument- Assurance prevents you rolling a Critical Failure by guaranteeing a Success without rolling. That is two steps by the logic you are using.Assurance guarantees a result of success for a DC 15 trained Treat Wounds check, as long as the character has a proficiency modifier of +5. If Mortal Healing were to apply to Treat Wounds checks using Assurance, it would guarantee a critical success instead. On a roll of 1d20+5 for a DC 15 Treat Wounds check using Mortal Healing you'd have a chance of 1/20 crit fails, 8/20 fails, and 11/20 crit successes. Now, if you modify the wording of Mortal Healing to allow it to be used with Assurance, you turn those crit fails and fails into crit successes.
While not quite the same that seems extremely close to Aratorin's quote from the published Errata that no ability will ever change your degree of success by more than one step.
I agree, it's inconsistent on Paizo's part, which is why I included the "While not quite the same..." bit. However, that doesn't change anything about that it seems much more likely that the rules as written for Mortal Healing are intended as written, rather than intended to be modified to guarantee free crit successes in Treat Wounds by level 3 with Assurance.
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As written, Mortal Healing requires a roll, and Assurance doesn't involve a roll.
This is not true. As quoted in the opening post:
You can forgo rolling a skill check for that skill to instead receive a result of 10 + your proficiency bonus
The conversation at the table goes like this:
PC: "I'd like to use Mortal Healing on the injured Fighter."
GM: "Alright, roll your Medicine check."
PC: "I don't want to risk failing. I'll use Assurance to forgo my roll."
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The fact that these discussions seem to always single out Mortal Healing, rather than, say...
Experienced Professional
Experienced Tracker
Fascinating Performance
Forager
Recognize Spell
Steady Balance
Student of the Canon
Quiet Allies
Sow Rumor
Unmistakable Lore
(and these are just the Level 1-2 feats)
...speaks more to the fact that people simply don't like how healing is handled in this edition, rather than there being any problem with Assurance.
As written, Mortal Healing requires a roll, and Assurance doesn't involve a roll.This is not true. As quoted in the opening post:
You can forgo rolling a skill check for that skill to instead receive a result of 10 + your proficiency bonusThe conversation at the table goes like this:
PC: "I'd like to use Mortal Healing on the injured Fighter."
GM: "Alright, roll your Medicine check."
PC: "I don't want to risk failing. I'll use Assurance to forgo my roll."
The correct order would be:
PC: I'd like to use Treat Wounds on the injured Fighter.GM: Alright, roll your Medicine check.
PC: I don't want to risk failing. I'll use Assurance to forego my roll
GM: Alright, your result is 16, because you have a proficiency modifier of +6, that's a regular success.
PC: I also have the feat Mortal Healing, which allows me to turn regular successes on Treat Wounds checks into critical successes.
GM: Yes, but that only applies if you actually roll a check. If you want to use that, you cannot use Assurance at the same time. Since this is the first time this came up (and both you and the target have fulfilled all other prerequisites), I'm happy to let you roll instead of using Assurance. Do you want to do that?
The reason this comes up with this particular feat is likely that this is the one feat out of all of these that is already very strong and would become vastly OP if used with Assurance to always guarantee critical success.
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The reason this comes up with this particular feat is likely that this is the one feat out of all of these that is already very strong and would become vastly OP if used with Assurance to always guarantee critical success.
...we're talking about healing hit points.
In fact, we're talking about healing +9 hit points, on average. Using two feats.
That's... What you consider to be "vastly OP"?
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I don't see that you've ever claimed the Continual Recovery feat was OP, so if you think this discussion is bad, prepare to be enraged:
With Assurance and Mortal Healing, you could potentially heal +18 hit points over the course of an hour. Whether you're 20th Level or 3rd.
BUT!
For the cost of just one feat, Continual Recovery could potentially heal hit points over that same time period!
01: 4.5 damage
02-09: 0 HP healed
10-19: 9 HP healed
20: 18 HP healed
Average 5.2 HP healed per check
6 checks/hour
And that's just with a +5 modifier! IMAGINE how bad it'll get by Level 4!
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When you write a general rule, you can't consider all the possible exceptions. The Mortal Healing text mentions rolling because rolling is the standard way of handling Treat Wounds; what really counts is the result, regardless of whatever abilities you may have used to improve, reroll or avoid the die.
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Even the rules for determining degree of success use the term roll. As do pretty much every feat or option that deals with skill checks similarly. As do the rules for making skill checks in general.
Treating Assurance as something distinct from rolling, rather than simply determining the result of your roll automatically as the text says, causes a lot of rules to break down.
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The reason this comes up with this particular feat is likely that this is the one feat out of all of these that is already very strong and would become vastly OP if used with Assurance to always guarantee critical success....we're talking about healing hit points.
In fact, we're talking about healing +9 hit points, on average. Using two feats.
That's... What you consider to be "vastly OP"?
Actually, the reason this specific question comes up is Assurance(Medicine) is actually fairly popular since the Treat Wounds DCs are low enough to make it useful (Trained difficulty auto-success at level 3, Expert difficulty auto-success at level 6, Master difficulty auto-success at level 14). For most other skills, you aren't as likely to take Assurance.
For example, my own question revolves around Sneak Savant (Rogue 10) but I don't actually have Assurance(Stealth) on my Thief (yet) so it's not exactly a pressing issue for me.
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Assurance does nothing at all. It is completely useless! For instance, you can't use it to climb, force open, or do any of the other abilities using the Athletics skill because they all use athletics checks: https://2e.aonprd.com/Skills.aspx?ID=3
Climb: You move up, down, or across an incline. Unless it’s particularly easy, you must attempt an Athletics check. The GM determines the DC based on the nature of the incline and environmental circumstances. You’re flat-footed unless you have a climb Speed.
In order to make this Athletics check (and this applies to ALL checks) you need to roll: https://2e.aonprd.com/Rules.aspx?ID=174
When you’re actively using a skill, often by performing one of its actions, you might attempt a skill check: rolling a d20 and adding your skill modifier. To determine this modifier, add your ability modifier for the skill’s key ability, your proficiency bonus for the skill, and any other bonuses and penalties.
Thus Assurance does nothing for a feat and is completely useless as you need to roll for everything.
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I distinctly remember a game developer answering a similar Assurance related question in the negative, saying something to the effect that an ability DIDN'T work with Assurance because said ability needed a roll, which Assurance negated.
If I can find it again, I'll share it here.
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I take the wording of Assurance to mean you don't have to physically roll (forgo rolling) and receive a result. The rules on Checks use the term "result" a lot, including in Step 2: Calculate the Result. Assurance gives you a result without physically rolling. Next is Step 3: Compare the Result to the DC. Step 4 goes even further, stating "You critically succeed at a check when the check's result meets or exceeds the DC by 10 or more."
Everyone's hung up on the word "roll" and is ignoring the word "result".