Playing 2e last night and we ended up fighting a krooth. One thing that left a bad taste in my mouth is that you need a DC 26 medicine check to stop the bleeding it inflicts, no other way will stop it. We had been getting on with lay on hands and spells, and my barbarian with very low medicine (just uses assurance to hit the 15 dc). So we had a very, very hard time dealing with it, even after it died.
Are there other situations like this, where if you aren't trained in a specific skill you're out of luck?
I would argue you could rip the tooth out unsafely and maintain the drained condition until you sleep for a night (maybe triggering a bleed hit automatically for the violent ripping, or even apply bite damage again if you want it to be more punitive). Then the bleeding will stop itself with a DC 15 flat check at EoT or with a normal medicine check.
So far as I can see, that Medicine check explicitly does not stop the bleeding. Its to safely remove the tooth and remove drained... the bleeding should be able to be stopped normally after the tooth is removed, as per persistent damage.
DC 26 is a Hard DC for the level of the creature, and should be difficult or unreliable during the encounter if you only have a trained party member with Medicine (I don't reccomend this for any party, especially by level 8). After combat, you should be able to easily keep the victim alive long enough to fish for a success (25% success rate minimum at trained if you are equal level to the Krooth).
If you're running published material, you will find other situations which are like this for skill checks. Keep in mind that in PF2, normal failures are expected for skill checks and normally don't prevent trying again - only Critical Failures tend to carry bad stuff, or count as a "permanent" failure.
The Krooth Tooth situation is likely to be scary, but the damage is unlikely to kill a party member out of combat if you have any healing at all available.
A couple of options
a) allow for unsafe removal: (GM fiat)
possibly doing some more upfront damage,
increasing the bleed to 2d6 or even 3d6, representing the large wound left behind.Maybe having the normal dc 15 flat check to drop the bleed damage 1d6 each time you get a success.
Drained only cleared via the normal nights sleep.
Maybe have unsafe removing add a poison or a disease condition.
b) Use the 'persistent damage usually stops after 1 minute' rule. Leaving the tooth embedded in the person, so they can't remove the drained condition until they can get it properly treated, but at least the bleeding ends.
b) Use the 'persistent damage usually stops after 1 minute' rule. Leaving the tooth embedded in the person, so they can't remove the drained condition until they can get it properly treated, but at least the bleeding ends.
Didn't know this rule existed! That's awesome.
For anyone that missed it like I did: Here you go
Last bit under Assisted Recovery.
Its a useful guideline for 'ok we're out of combat, you've been trying these rolls for a while and failing. lets move the story along'. It's still subject to GM choice, and I can picture GM's saying the Krooth rules override that guideline. (Krooth specific overriding the general, etc)
Some good advice here, thanks all. I would have been pretty upset if it had actually ended up killing anyone after the battle (we were in relatively good health after the actual fight, the bleed went on ten more rounds before our dm decided the teeth vanished as it was a summoned creature). If dieing had happened, I would've brought up some of the ideas here, like pulling the tooth or the bleed ending but keeping drained.
I do think that it's a pretty silly thing though. I understand if characters are punished if they aren't prepared for situations, like ghosts, swarms, nasty diseases, etc. But those have multiple solutions, and even then you can usually fumble through with them. The krooth thing seems different to me. Only one single way to solve the problem, and all you can really do is burn through heal spells until you can hit the DC. And keep in mind you would need healers tools in addition to a high enough skill to hit the DC. Aaaaand, if you're like my character and had a very low medicine, you're very often crit failing to remove the tooth, and depending on your reading you might take double bleed damage. I don't know, it's probably just me, but I very much dislike there only being a single way to deal with a problem. I'm lucky that I have a lenient gm, but if they did adhere to raw I wouldn't entirely blame them.