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I've been checking the Kingdom Rules for the Kingmaker Adventure Path (2nd edition) I'm running for some friends of mine, and I've realized that the Kingdom feat "Kingdom Assurance" is useless.
It says that you pick one Kingdom skill, and once per turn, you can forego rolling and instead pick 10 + proficiency bonus, without applying any other bonuses or penalties.
Alright, that's fine. But... the only levels where 10 + Proficiency Bonus is enough to surpass Control DC are Level 3 (PB 17 vs DC 16), 4 (PB 18 vs DC 18), 7 (PB 23 vs DC 23), and 8 (PB 24 vs DC 24). Elsewhere, it's always a failure (not a critical failure, so there's that at least).
So, either this is an erratum (if you could add the Ability Modifier it would actually work) or it's actually meant to work like that.
Why would it be an error of any sort? That's now how normal Assurance works as well.
Why would it be an error of any sort? That's now how normal Assurance works as well.
This. Kingdom Assurance works like Assurance does and thus shares this problem.
Assurance is good for Medicine because it has so many flat DCs that Assurance can actually get ahead of them. On any DC by level check, Assurance basically never works unless its an Easy or below level check, and those are cases where if you're actually good at the skill you're highly likely to succeed anyway.
Kingdom building has the exact same problem since most things are on the Control DC: it's usually not going to work. It would help you with easy buildings since those are flat DCs, but not a lot else.
So yes, it is a bad feat... but I don't think that's due to an error. It's just porting over a PF2 skill feat that itself is only sometimes good and putting it into a context where it's generally worse... and then slapping a cooldown on it for some reason.
The kingdom rules have a lot of design problems and this is one of them.