Well symbolic ai is cumbersome and slow in general. Unless you have a very simple model this kind of planning is probably too slow for most realtime games, but fine for turn based. The main problem is that whenever an action is taken the model changes so you have to rebuild the plan, or assume that everything is going to end up fine.
Its basically just another search algo, but with pre-conditions, so if you know minimax or a* you should be able to pick it up fairly quickly. If you want to find out more related info google "block worlds" or "micro worlds" I havent actually implemented STRIPS myself yet, just read about it.
