Hey guys, I am running a pregen, and as I read it, I keep seeing things like "make an average piloting check.... Failure means you hit a tree. A despair results...."

Is the only way to get the despair through destiny points? Am I missing something huge? I see this kind of thing a lot in the pregen, but I can't see it happening without me flipping destiny points.

Is that something I want to be doing? It seems cheapened if I do it on all checks?

Any advice/clarification would be greatly appreciated.

When PCs fight an opponent with the Adversary (X) trait, a number of their Difficulty dice equal to the Adversary rating are Upgraded to Challenge dice on checks against that opponent.

Also I would use dark side Destiny to Upgrade when you feel it's climactic and appropriate, and probably never for Minions barring very special circumstances. Using it for every check cheapens the shock value a lot, and cheapens the value of spending light side Destiny (or disincentivizes the players to do so if they know you will immediately start doing the same). Also not every use of dark side Destiny should be just forcing a difficulty Upgrade. It has as much narrative power as light side Destiny after all.

Ok, so I was reading it right. It just seems odd to me that all the checks have a despair option.... Climbing, piloting, computers, perception, astrogation. It seems like overload to me, but perhaps it is just options...

It just represents the always-present chance of things going badly wrong. Examples for the skills you just mentioned:

-Climbing: You lose your grip on your rope and fall to the bottom of whatever you were climbing, taking fall damage, maybe dying if it's high enough.

-Piloting: Your ship's engines just blew out and need to be repaired. Decrease your ship's speed and/or handling until they're fixed.

-Computers: You trigger an alarm and get locked out of the system. Blast doors close and knockout gas gets pumped into the room. Make a Resilience check to stay conscious, or wake up in binders surrounded by Stormtroopers.

-Perception: In a horrible moment of oversight, you not only don't see what you were looking for, but while you were distractedly looking around you mistakenly step on a pressure plate and activate a stun mine.

-Astrogation: You input the wrong coordinates into your navcomputer and wind up in the middle of an asteroid field, being buffeted on all sides. Better make some piloting checks!

The addition of/upgrading to red challenge dice isn't a solid thing. The gm can apply them with destiny points, but depending on the narrative the gm can upgrade a roll without one. So when writing pregens the authors will sometimes include suggested Despair result options to try and help the gm.

You can also use a Triumph to upgrade the difficulty of the targeted characters next check. I'm using this more and more rather than just using them for crits.