Ah, yeah. The trouble of Force power scaling. It’s super difficult, especially on a board with a massive amount of PVP with relatively high stakes. The other issue is the amount of time so many people get written here. Aeshi, for example, I’ve been writing for five or six IRL years, and that comes out to probably close twenty to thirty years in board time. The only people we see in the movies for that long are Anakin, Palpatine, Yoda, Luke, Chewbacca, Obi-Wan, Han, and Leia. Well, them and R2 and C-3PO.Starting out with a new character is very helpful in that way, because you don’t have that sort of time creating layers and layers of experience.
For starting out at a low level, I always think of Ezra Bridger in the start of Rebels. He’s pretty much the perfect example of somebody just beginning to learn the Force. There are things he can begin to do innately, based on his own personal talents. Then there are things he has to learn, which he can do, and then there are things he just never manages to learn.
To use that more directly, what I would do is pick two or things things that a character has a natural aptitude for. Maybe it’s telekinesis, or lightsaber dueling, or mentalism. They’re not especially great at these yet, but they’re easier to learn than other skills. Then I’d do the opposite and work out four or five things that are especially difficult for them to learn, as perhaps it’s very technical or they don’t have any natural aptitude in those areas. Everything else can be learn at about an average pace and they’re neither especially good nor especially poor at it.
Another take is the idea of specializing into being a generalist. By that, I mean the character can learn lots of things at an average ability, but will never be incredibly skilled at all, or even most of them. Average healing, average dueling, average telekinesis.
As for balance in comparison to stuff in the factory, my suggestion is write better and write clever. Clever writers with padawans have beat Sith Lords here on multiple occasions and non-Force Users have beat Force users fairly often with forethought and planning. My main Jedi character doesn’t use a lightsaber, but can match any of the super powerful Sith Lords one on one because none of their armor or lightsabers are really prepared for the fact that they’re fighting someone with a walking stick and mugs of tea he throws at them. Creativity, out of character friendliness, and clever writing will make even the weakest Force user someone who can tangle with someone more powerful, but more importantly, it can be more enjoyable and makes interacting with other people a better experience for you as a writer than trying to keep up with the faction arms race if you don’t want to.
