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This site has always been obsessed with power levels; it's amusing to see how many comments are on this post. I have never cared very much about power levels, and Dom said he never cared much either, but once we got our hands on the notes and saw all the detail on power rankings, making a list was just too tempting. So I guess the obsession rubbed off on me through Dom...

Glad you got pulled into this. While ultimately meaningless, I always found the OP strength thing a fun little debate to discuss. That said, maybe you can clarify some things we've been debating here:

1) We know a woman at level one more or less equals a man at level ++1, things like skill, etc. being equal. Does this carry on down the scale? Is there functional equivalency between levels 2 and ++2, 11 and 5, 66 and 60, and so on?

2) The female dexterity advantage: I believe there's no way RJ would have needlessly complicated things by making that advantage be on a scale, so that a stronger woman has a larger advantage than a weaker one. I think its a constant boost for all women. Did you see any hints that point to one or the other?

Thanks!

Can't recall anything of the kind in the notes. There were no "academic" discussions of this type about the OP in anything we've seen (or very very rarely, all already revealed by the Companion or Terez). My impression is that the inner logic of the system he had devised was enough for RJ not to need to write all this down, let alone make scales and charts he had no real need of.

He knew by rote the principles (he mastered his whole system more than enough to be able to give answers about the details or the principles to fans "on the go", and he had taken the time to assign a strength level to most female characters as he frequently needed comparisons among women (either for the way AS saw WO, potential recruits etc. or to determine how AS should act among a given group of sisters), and for him it seems it was enough.

The storytelling itself, the dramatic needs, obviously drove the rest of his decisions, which explains in a good part why he was never overly generous with details that might later tie him down. We've rarely seen him (outside the circle of the main players) eliminate Talents for specific sisters or WO, or give them some Talent without a plot-driven need. I think it was a great deal a matter of being cautious. He didn't want to be stuck in a storyline suddenly needing something that he had for no good reason eliminated the possibility of. We can see from the notes that he relatively often kept a few aces up his sleeve, probably for those motives: e.g.: he tried to remain discreet about the strength of a few sisters (or WO, Windfinder, Kin) in each storyline, so he could reveal her as stronger or weaker if the plot demanded it. He did reveal (or eliminated) a few Talents from time to time, but more often he waited until he needed to - and the notes revealed it's pretty much because he didn't much pre-assign Talents.

To be honest, I used to think there were probably files about the OP that Harriet had kept and thus were not part of the boxes sent to the Library. From the little new details offered in the Companion (and make no mistake, Harriet was all too aware of the interest from some fans for this, that's why they made the effort to compile and include every strength level mentioned...you guys were a little harsh when you criticized these efforts to compile from various sources, eliminate most of the conflicts etc. based on the very few discrepancies they have missed...) it's more and more obvious this wasn't really the case, or those files were really old and no longer fully accurate. The"final" system, RJ probably knew by rote. From clues like the way sisters with no names (or occasionally, Ajah) sometime appear in the notes merely as place holders with a strength level, it's pretty apparent that RJ really did make himself a bell curve at some point, and create a pool of women to match the WT effectives. I think he came up with a formula, applied it to get the number of sisters of each level he should have, and that was it. He knew he could also cheat quite a bit even then, without this becoming apparent. I'm not convinced he even kept those calculations somewhere, as its the results that were important to him.

The other thing which should have clued us about the non existence of very elaborate OP notes is that Brandon obviously had nothing of the kind to go by, and he followed in RJ's footsteps of "innovating" as he went along and as his story demanded, with the extremely uneven results that we know, him not being RJ and all. In his work Brandon prefers a wholly different approach, where he sets himself constrictive rules and forces himself to follow them. He believes it makes him more creative in the solutions he finds to fit his system. But he's said in various Q&A and interviews that RJ himself preferred to have as few constraints as possible, beyond the basics explained in the book.

As for your specific question, I've seen nothing, but I believe the way the system works is that the dexterity advantage for women is a constant/general rule and that the male/female scales match if you align them properly. At any level, a man's strength in actual effects is similar/equal to a woman six levels below him. This is why I think the last 6 levels for women don't exist for men, and that both scales only have 66, for a total of 72 levels with the ++ levels.

Personally I don't believe RJ went very far in his elaboration and use of the male scale. I don't think he bothered with a bell curve distribution for the Asha'man, because he didn't assign a strength to each. In fact, he set a strength for very, very few of them. First of all, he probably knew he wouldn't have enough male channelers for the strength distribution to be apparent, and above all he knew that since their interactions aren't based on a strength-derived hierarchy, the reader wouldn't have anywhere as many clues to guess at the character's exact strength. Finally, as men gained strength suddenly, that left him much leeway to make any male player stronger, or even much stronger than he used to be when the plot required it.

RJ probably had some basic rules he followed for the strength of angreal/san'angreal, but again it seems he kept not elaborate notes on that, and mentions of how much a specific object added are very rare (I can only recall a mention that Cadsuane's pushed her in the ++ male levels, and that Moiraine's placed her near the top female levels)

It was all a lot vaguer, a lot more plot-driven than some fans would have liked it to be. Only with RJ alive to complete the missing information for Harriet post-series might you have gotten a lot of new details, as it seems most of the system wasn't written down.