User blog:Jedi Master 76/Retrospective 3 -- Character Attributes

This time, I thought I'd make something a bit more interesting to look at than WALL-OF-TEXT. Given the similarities to Japanese data books, an alternate title would be, "WHAT? 9000!?", but I have a bit of self-respect.

Way back when, sometime during the writing of Hands of Evening, I intended to use some of the series' characters in a role-playing game as NPCs. In the process, I worked out some comparative numbers like physical strength, Force power, skill with a blaster, and so on for a handful of characters.

Even after that campaign ended, I kept tallying character data for most of the important heroes and villains in the series. I had planned to use it as a sort of epilogue, where an investigator for the Sith Empire files a report for the Emperor surrounding the events of Jedi Mourning and gives his advice on how to 'deal with' individual characters based on their perceived strengths and weaknesses. I actually started dabbling in it, but I got bored with it, so only pictures remain for your perusal.

Each character is rated in 7 "attributes"&mdash;weapon skill, Force potential, martial prowess, marksmanship, constitution, intellect, and will.


 * Weapon skill, when discussing Jedi, is their skill with a lightsaber. When dealing with non-Forceful folks, it is their skill with their melee weapon of choice, usually a vibrosword.
 * Force potential is a character's raw connection to the Force and their comparative proficiency in its use. All characters who are not Jedi or Sith have 0 for this.
 * Martial prowess is hand-to-hand combat ability.
 * Marksmanship is general skill with a blaster or slugthrower, and someone who has received law enforcement or military training will naturally be a bit higher than most.
 * Constitution is the general physical strength and health of the character; older characters have less constitution than younger, smaller species have less than larger, and women a bit less than men, although the Force negates this in all aforementioned cases.
 * Intellect is a character's general intelligence and roughly correlated to their IQ.
 * Will represents their willpower, drive, and willingness to keep fighting after being wounded. Characters with less than 5 can be influenced by Force-users.

The scale goes from 0-10, with 0 being a crippling disability or handicap, 10 being near unapproachable mastery, and 5 about average. It should be noted that these ratings are only relative to characters within the series. Typical Jedi like Scout or Zayne Carrick would get mostly 5s and 6s, but legendary Jedi and Sith like Darth Vader, Luke Skywalker, Revan, Yoda, Palpatine, etc. would be impossible to factor into this system.

Characters are listed in order of their appearance, if they fought. Characters who are particularly below average (e.g. Nohli Crescen) or who only appear in a single novel (e.g. Altesius) are not included unless they are very important characters. They are not repeated in the next image if their skills did not sufficiently improve or else they died in the meantime. Most characters should have unique colors, but they were automatically generated so I cannot guarantee that. There are a lot of characters to look at, so you'll probably have to give the images a click to get a better look.

The first image deals with characters at the beginning of the Jedi Civil War. This includes the novels Convict's Dawn and Vanguard of the Republic.



Some notes (with spoilers, of course):
 * Siblings, like Raen and Jaeln, tend to have a similar distributions of their attributes.
 * Dynatha is very weak. So is Jhosua.
 * Verita Ladola is currently a Dark Jedi known as Lamyia.
 * Most Jedi and Sith have no blaster/slugthrower skill to speak of.
 * Characters lacking the Force tend to take on the same general attribute shape.

The next image deals with the later part of the Jedi Civil War. This would line up with Knights of Alderaan and Phantom Rising.



In this image:
 * The Benax siblings grow more quickly than any other character.
 * Verita has mostly recovered from her fall to the dark side.
 * Ranval gets a bump after being recruited as a Jedi.
 * Jhosua improves as a soldier and takes up sniper training, explaining his jump in Marksmanship.
 * The Sith on Alderaan have a particularly low Will given their time serving Preux.

Our next batch of charts ranks characters during the events of The Sith Lords, which would coincide with Absolution and Hands of Evening.



Things to note:
 * Raen and Jaeln both became stronger, but Jaeln edges his brother out by just a bit.
 * Dynatha's time with the Jedi Covenant increases her Force potential dramatically.
 * Tserne has mostly recovered from his imprisonment by the Sith.
 * Celes Sunrider has become as strong as the Benax siblings.

And the characters who participate in the events of Jedi Mourning, nearly 20 years later.




 * Jaeln, Dynatha are the only characters to 'cap' Force potential in the main series (in the prequel novel, so do Raystin and Avaran).
 * Children of existing characters tend to have the average stats of both parents, although they can also receive either extremes. Forcefulness is not necessarily inheritable.
 * Celes is nearly as strong as the main protagonist and antagonist.
 * Jaeln's Sith minions are stronger than the Sith who served his father.

Finally, a bonus image to show the main characters in Dark Covenant, about 25 years before Knights of the Old Republic.



It's hard to compare these characters to those in the main series because the 'caliber' of Jedi and Sith is so much better, and thus their strengths are far greater than those that come later. It should be noted that Raystin and Elbrook are considered the finest duelists of their generation in the Jedi Order.

They're not all OP, I promise.