This rule is written notoriously poorly, as are other features. You'll note the rules example tells you that your damage type changes, but the rule itself tells you to substitute the resistance value and doesn't tell you to change the damage type. It's unfortunate.
In this case, though, you should note that void healing doesn't mean you heal when you take void damage—you still only heal from a spell if it says it heals. An enemy dhampir doesn't heal from wails of the damned, for example, and living creatures don't heal from the vitality damage portion of a Fire Kineticist's Solar Detonation. (Neither will take damage from the respective damage type, but likewise, neither will heal from it.) The confusion is understandable given how Harm and Heal 3A casts are worded, IMO. But my understanding is that "deal void damage to living" and "heal undead" are two separate functions and both don't occur unless the spell says they do.
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Yes, this:
You have studied the delicate balance of life and death to such a point that you can dance between them with ease. Whenever you cast a spell or use an ability that would deal void or vitality damage, use the weaker of the target’s resistance or immunity to void or to vitality. For instance, if the creature were immune to void and had no resistance or immunity to vitality damage, it would take vitality damage from the spell or ability. Resistance or immunity to both (or to all damage) applies as normal.
Only affects Void and Vitality damage. It does not modify how Void or Vitality healing effects work.
So you could still restore HP on an Undead ally with the Harm spell .
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So, one player in our group states, think that the "Mastery of Life and Death" class feature (Necromancer, Playtest) makes it impossible to heal allied undead/dhampirs (whatever has negative healing), because "void healing is essencially an immmunity to void damage", so it will automatically switch to dealing vitality damage.
My guess would be, that if a character effectivly choses to heal an undead, he will not have a reflex to use vitality instead. Although the Trait doesn't have a "you may do x" conditioning, your character shouldn't be an imbecile.
Same should go for Sneak Attack. Yes, 99% of the time, I want to use Sneak attack.
But if my buddy is confused, and I want to slap him back to his senses), my character shouldn't automatically rip out the guys lungs, just because he's confused and therefore off-guard.I guess most would agree that the application of void-damage/sneak attack (+ certainly there's more) should not be mandatory. Is there anything written down that's more specific than "the first rule "(PC1, page 6), that I can refer to, because I don't want to seem like "bending the rules as I please"?
The stupidest thing I met in actual play is when you get a critical success on a non-lethal Strike, you kill the NPC you were trying to subdue because of the massive damage rule.
Because you hit them so well that you just cannot get the exact result you want but its actual opposite.
Turns your Nat 20 in the worse old Fumble effect of a Nat 1.
Even the most "strict RAW" ruling would not work that way. The most technically correct reading is that you may not cast heal on a dhampir unless they were willing, and that you could cast harm on them even if they were unwilling; in which case they would take the void damage because they're a living creature, which in this pedantic scenario would be converted to vitality damage by Mastery of Life and Death,
That's true. Mastery of Life and Death would throw a further wrench into the works and cause Harm to actually cause damage to the Dhampir creature or other living creatures with Void Healing.
and then they would be healed by the void healing because "If the target is a willing undead creature, you restore that amount of Hit Points." is clearly a "void effect that heals undead."
I'm not sure on that. Unless something has changed recently that I am not aware of.
Last I saw, that was a bit of reminder text in the Dhampir heritage itself, not part of Void Healing.
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This has been a problem forever in certain contexts with these features. Nudge the Scales on Oracle has the same issue in some edge cases where you can wind up in the "you have Void healing, so Heal's vitality healing doesn't heal you, but you're also still alive so RAW Harm can't target you with healing" situation.
The best way to handle those situations is to glean what the intent of the rule is (Void Healing makes you function as if you were an undead for those purposes) and ignore RAW, because following RAW when it leads to clearly nonsensical outcomes is a troll ruling.
Mastery of Life and Death is in the same boat: it inherits the same poor wording because the core problem causing it still exists, so you have to apply some common sense in how you run it. If you're casting a spell that should heal your target (such as Harm on something with Void Healing), then that's what should happen regardless of if you have Mastery of Life and Death, as the intent of the feature is to let you overcome immunities to damage. It's not intended to stop you from healing.
As for Sneak Attack... yeah, RAW doesn't say you can choose to not Sneak Attack but Sneak Attack is aiming for vital areas. There's no common sense reason for why you wouldn't be able to simply not do that if you're trying to slap your buddy back to their senses.
"The first rule" is absolutely an appropriate rule in this case: RAW is doing something ridiculous and not fun, so you're making a ruling to fix that. RAW is not perfect, especially in edge cases. That's all the justification that is needed.