GM ruled today that I could not reroll a check using a Hero Point after the result of the check becomes known.
Is that the case? I looked up the rules for Hero Points, and I couldn't find anything about timing.
I'm also not seeing in the rules where it specifies whether you decide to use the Hero Point before you roll, after you roll but before you know the degree of success, or after you know the degree of success.
Before you roll seems really limiting. For such a limited resource, it should be less likely to be wasted than that. And most Fortune effects let you at least see the dice result before triggering the use of the effect.
And with the tight math of PF2 I am not seeing much distinction between using the Hero Point before or after you know the degree of success (or rather degree of failure). You can generally tell that if you roll a 3 on the d20 then you fail without the GM needing to announce it. And if you roll a 12 and it is questionable, then it likely isn't a good place to use a Hero Point anyway. It has already happened to me a few times that I Hero Point a roll of a 3 and get a 2 on the reroll.
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This came up before and we do have a fairly official answer (at the time, Mark Seifter was still a Paizo game designer). Note also my earlier analysis in that thread.
Long and short of it is: you decide to use a hero point after learning if the roll was a crit/success/failure/critfailure.
However, no later than that. Once you decide not to reroll a failure, you can't listen to the effect and decide "gosh, that's a lot of damage, I'm going to reroll after all".
If we follow the strictest reading of the rules, "Rolling a check" is made up of 4 steps, as described on page 400 of Player Core:
1 - Roll d20
2- Calculate Result
3 - Compare to DC
4 - Determine Degree of Success
Only when you've done all 4 of these have you actually attempted a given check, therefore rerolling a check would mean we do all 4, and if we don't like the result, we do all 4 again.
Note that "knowing what the degree of success actually does" isn't part of this, so Ascalaphus would be correct there. I personally would allow it anyway just to give players more agency, but I definitely think you choose when to reroll after you know if it's Crit Success/Success/Failure/Crit Failure.
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Just my two cents. This ruling is really annoying in Foundry VTT. You can turn off if players learn their success or failure automatically but it really defeats the point of how useful the automation is. It might not be an illegal ruling but it is an irritating ruling and I wouldn’t play at that table anymore.
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Fortune and misfortune effects can alter how you roll your dice. These abilities might allow you to reroll a failed roll, force you to reroll a successful roll, allow you to roll twice and use the higher result, or force you to roll twice and use the lower result.
Since hero points do not fall under the other listed situations, they follow the first option of rerolling a failed check.
Since this is just a list of what these abilities 'might' do, it is not necessarily exhaustive (and happens to also not actually be exhaustive). You can definitely reroll a success with a Hero Point to try for a critical, for example.
A better additional example is Devise a Strategem which doesn't involve rolling a second time at all. So it definitely doesn't fall into any of those examples listed for the Fortune trait.
Devise a Strategem does follow the actual rule text of the Fortune trait though since it alter how you roll your dice.
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Which thread though? I can't find it (quickly) even searching your posts for 'hero point'...This came up before and we do have a fairly official answer (at the time, Mark Seifter was still a Paizo game designer). Note also my earlier analysis in that thread.
Long and short of it is: you decide to use a hero point after learning if the roll was a crit/success/failure/critfailure.
D'oh! I thought I'd put in the link.
here it is.
Here's a section on the rules for making a check.
Other times, you might not know the DC right away. Swimming across a river would require an Athletics check, but it doesn’t have a specified DC—so how will you know if you succeed or fail? You call out your result to the GM and they will let you know if it is a success, failure, or otherwise. While you might learn the exact DC through trial and error, DCs sometimes change, so asking the GM whether a check is successful is the best way to determine whether or not you have met or exceeded the DC.
If you don't know how well you did, you can just ask the GM even if the DC is hidden. It's public knowledge unless it's a secret check.