So, as I look through the F&D book, grabbing at ideas, and trying to hammer out understanding of this not d20/pool d10 system, I see a lot of things that say "you can take X strain to do y". These seem to be common, and not just among the Force-users. Is there another mechanic as important, possibly excluding health, as that keeps you LIVING, or is it just a nice min/maxing race to gather up as much Grit, Willpower, Discipline, and/or Cool as you can, and see how far you can push.

Yeah, this probably sounds as much like a min/maxing question of a player as it gets, but some of the things are cool, some might be things I'm just used to characters doing, and now are attached to a new mechanic, and with typically only a dozen or so Strain, and spending it in chunks of 2 or 3 for a single thing, it feels it would rack up. Seems to come back easily enough, though. So, is it something for everyone to prioritize, or just a good thing to keep in mind, while you play the game like a character?

So, is it something for everyone to prioritize, or just a good thing to keep in mind, while you play the game like a character?

For every character, it is totally worth picking up every talent of grit or toughened at the 5xp level across all their specs.

For characters that have talents fueled by strain (which included all saber-jockeys), it is probably worth buying every strain talent within "easy reach", but probably not worth going down otherwise "useless" paths.

Not worthwhile for anyone to pick up extra specs just for the grits and toughs.

It really depends how you end up using your skills and talents I'd imagine but overall.. yes, I do believe Strain can be very useful to most any character. As Lorne mentions, picking up the relevant talents will help in that area but also remember that you can recover strain with extra Advantage dice as well, and doing this is one of the few things which can be done multiple times per roll as well, if I recall correctly.

Yep. In actual play, Strain is important enough to become the default application of player-rolled advantage, and that's not wrong at all.

Yep. In actual play, Strain is important enough to become the default application of player-rolled advantage, and that's not wrong at all.

^^ This

. Is there another mechanic as important, possibly excluding health, as that keeps you LIVING,

Since you mention transitioning from other systems, I'm gonna take this opportunity to point out something that others transitioning have trouble with. Crossing your Wound Threshold knocks you out, and gives you a Crit. Every time you take wounds after that you get an additional Crit. You stop tracking Wounds at double your threshold, but that's all. Hitting double your WT isn't a kill, it's just the point where you don't keep track anymore.

A character can only be truly killed by a Crit result that includes Death, which you'll notice there's really only Two results that do, and only one that's immediate.

Now, of course a lot of NPCs can be killed upon exceeding their WT because at that point their purpose has been fulfilled, but killing a Player (especially in one or two hits) is intentionally supposed to be a difficult thing to do. A hit from a Vehicle scale weapon can do it, and there's a couple weapons with really high vicious ratings that can do it, but beyond that it'll usually take a fire, drowning, spacing, poison gas, acid baths, or something else that causes persistent ongoing damage to kill a PC.