Sorry I haven’t responded sooner, was experiencing a bug that prevented me from testing any of this, but that’s resolved.
Basically I’m cheating, I wanted to use my level blueprint to spawn my player because it seemed the easiest way to grab it as a reference for other code I’m using and it was fine for what I was focused on. I’ve since decided for a number of reasons that I should just do it the “right” way. I wanted my transform in my gamestate because it’s for a checkpoint saving system, and I was avoiding using a player controller (because I don’t understand them), but now that I understand better the reasoning behind separating these functions and data I’m going to go ahead and follow the rules to save myself trouble later.
I’m gonna go and post a new question detailing how I might approach some of these things, some (all) of the tuts on this subject seem to be outdated as they use nodes that either no longer exist or have been renamed. I also see several nodes available which seem to be made specifically for implementing a respawn at checkpoint system, but none of the tuts I’ve seen use these nodes. My new question will be something to the effect of “How to properly implement a checkpoint, respawn, and save system using the engines built in implementation.”