So...

As per RAW, Committing a Force Die decreases your effective Force Rating (That is, as it's used to calculate how many Force Dice you're throwing, or for items/abilities that scale based on your Force Rating)

Survival of the Fittest (Seeker-Hermit) and Knowledge is Power (Mystic-Advisor) both allow a character, once per session, to treat their Force Rating as equal to their ranks in Survival or Lore respectively.

Could these talents temporarily re-up a Force Rating that has been effectively reduced by committing Force Dice?

Consider this Scenario:

The party Hermit normally has Force Rating 3. She's committed all 3 of her Force Dice to the Seek power's Mastery upgrade so she can crit the heck out of the Inquisitor the party's fighting, reducing her effective FR to 0. But, OH NO! the Inquisitor uses Move to disarm her of her energy bow! In this case, she also possesses the Move power, and on the turn after committing to Seek she uses Survival of the Fittest (with 3 ranks in Survival) to re-up her FR to 3 and hurl a huge boulder at the Inquisitor, probably using the automatic Triumph to do something really cool.

Does this work? Would you allow it? I'm willing to say yes, because once-per-session abilities should allow you to do cool and unexpected heroicslike that, but I was wondering what you guys think.

If you had 3 dice committed and used survival of the fittest with 4 ranks in survival, as a GM, I would allow only 1 force dice to be open.

Sounds like a good question for the developers.

Seeing as it's a once per session, one shot ability, I don't have a problem this particular interpretation.

The talent replaces the normal FR for one Check per session. It doesn´t add the whole rating to the FR!

In your example nothing would happen at all since your hermit already has a force rating of 3 and her survival is also 3.

Her FR is 3 with 3 dedicatet. If she had survival 4 for one check she would have one free FR to use, if she is not willing to regain the dedicated FR.

Otherwise she would have a total of 6 FR instead of 3 at that moment. Then she could say: "Hey I commited 3 dice last round, now I activate survival of the fittest to gain new 3 dice, and now as an incedentall i´ll free the three I commitet and now I can use an FR of 6 for my Move-Check - Muhahahaha... would´nt fit, would it?!

Oh and by the way if the survival would be one the force rating would actuall be reduced when activatet... but who would do that...

Just send the rules question using this.

I interpret this as a "Yes."

Keep in mind, the text (as I remember it) says that for one Force power check (meaning one roll) you treat your Force Rating as equal to your ranks in the given skill.

Also, based on the wording of how committing Force Dice works, when you commit a die your Force Rating literally decreases; the committed Dice do not count as part of your Force Rating while committed.

So those together mean that when you have FR 3 and then commit 3 dice (let's say to maintain a Bind), you then have FR 0. So if you activate Knowledge is Power or Survival of the Fittest, you roll a number of Force Dice equal to the greater of your FR (currently 0) or your ranks (X).

Also, a couple of logical things about this: it only affects the roll (the "extra" FR, as it were, cannot be committed), and it's one roll per session. It's not that bad, considering how rare and expensive these talents are. Also, I really hate talents, especially big, tree defining talents, becoming useless. I rule that if someone has both Enhanced Leader and the final Influence control upgrade that pips spent add both Success and Advantage on Leadership checks, because otherwise a unique, flavorful talent from a tree that could really use some love anyway becomes easily less than useless compared to a cheap, universally-available power. Likewise, if you're game is high-powered, it's entirely possible to get a FR of 5+, so if the benefits of these talents, one of the tree-defining talents in those two specs, are made useless after a certain point.

Since as it's been noted, these are "once per session" talents, I'd be okay with disregarding committed Force dice when the PC calculates their Force Rating for that one action, with the skill ranks replacing the PC's active Force Rating (whatever they've got left after committing Force dice).

Yeah, it's a bit on the powerful side, but then so are many of the "once per session" abilities that let a PC do something awesome.

First I thought "of course they replace your total Force Rating, not your current Force Rating, what is wrong with you people!"

Then I reconsidered and now I think I was wrong with my knee-jerk reaction. I think committing dice and then activating that talent is totally legit, probably even intended. I always thought Knowledge is Power was a bit on the weak side - it is pretty expensive (including the ranks in Knowledge you need), doesn't give you more than one extra Force dice at character creation because of the skill cap, and is once per session. It also becomes obsolete alarmingly quickly unless you really focus on that skill - which may be a sign of insanity considering you can put the same xp into diving for the Force Rating talent.

This interpretation may actually make Knowledge is Power a legit choice.