D000d... you're asking how to make a full game with PlayMaker, that'd take a whole fricken tutorial
Anyways, I'll give you some hints.
Question One: How can I have it where a game object has 3 lives and when it collides with a trigger loses a life before respawing to set location? Also displaying a counter on screen.
Don't put your lives in the "character" game object, or else when you destroy it you'll lose track of your lives. I'd recommend you having one main FSM attached to one object (call it "gamedata" or "gamevar") at the root of the scene. Put your main or global variables there, in your case create a "playerlives" integer variable and initialize it with the value of 3. At your character Game object add an FSM and set it up like this:
Then in your main gamevar object create and add an event named "ePlayerWasHit" to the initial state, which adds -1 (ie. subtracts one) from the playerlives variable. As for question two, you can use a similar approach, just add some GUI actions to your main FSM ("gamevar" in my example).
I have EzGUI and Sprite Manager if that makes a difference??
There aren't EzGUI or Sprite Manager actions publicly available for Playmaker as of yet, although I'll be working on some for SpriteManager 2 this week and intend to release it publicly. Anyways, I don't see the need for them on such a simple scenario, simply use the new GUI system/actions available in Playmaker 1.1.
Hope this is of some use for you and other novices. Good luck, Bilko!