To be more specific: I feel like Harlequin's character sheet contains far, far too much space dedicated to explaining how super-duper-awesome and amazing he is, and how much cooler he is than everyone else, and how much more powerful he is than everyone else, and so on. The result is that instead of coming across as an NPC, he comes across as an enormous Mary Sue. Specific examples:
The sidebar about his tradition. I agree, a simple note saying "Harlequin uses a custom tradition similar to Hermetic, but with Intuition resisting drain" would have been plenty.
"The initiate grade and Magic attribute given here do not necessarily represent the upper limits of Harlequin’s magical capacity, merely the upper limits of what the Sixth World is likely to require of him."
Yeah I see your point now: most of that stuff was actually put in specifically to try and
avoid pissing off the fan base, ironically.
Basically, when I dropped Lugh Surehand's stats, someone literally linked me to a PC they had played that could blast him to death. It was a completely ridiculous 40-50+ dice pool monster PC that wouldn't even be allowed in an "ultra-high-power" campaign by any reasonable GM, but still...it existed, and it was preposterous, and I wanted to account for that. Besides revamping the way I looked at numerically optimizing mages (specifically, I think I learned a lesson about the efficacy of Shielding Foci versus Counterspelling Foci thanks to whoever posted those stats), I also wanted to make sure, generally speaking, that no one was looking at Harlequin and thinking "this is pretty weak compared to some of the crap in my campaign".
"The initiate grade and Magic attribute given here do not necessarily represent the upper limits of Harlequin’s magical capacity, merely the upper limits of what the Sixth World is likely to require of him."
So I put in those lines because I didn't want the character's theoretical power to be limited by my own ability to optimize and at this level by "optimize" I of course really mean "choose arbitrarily high numbers".
So it was less *fap fap fap omfg Harlequin force 1,000,000* and more *let me really cover my bases here and make it clear he's the most powerful metahuman magician in the world and every aspect of his writeup reflects that*. It's not that I particularly think that what's interesting about the character is how ZOMG powerful he is--that's not what draws me to the character--it's just a canonically established fact that I felt obliged to comply with.
tl;dr generally speaking, coming up with Harlequin's canonical stats was a really daunting task; Shadowrun has made a point of not statting him before this point, and there's the whole theory of "if you stat it, players will find a way to kill it" and all of that was on my mind. The lines in question were supposed to be my escape clause, so to speak, in case I screwed anything up. I can see what you mean when you say they came across as belaboring the point, though.
Saying he knows all spells, and then having that enormous, bloated list of favorite spells. A shorter list would have been far more useful. The "Demolish Pants" spell, for example, got buried under a tide of generic spells. I think everyone can figure out that if Harlequin needs to knock out a bunch of people, he can Stunball them. I'd rather know that he likes casting Physical Double Image and other "trademark" spells like that.
I know it's a gigantic list, but that list of spells was really just supposed to be his favored spells. With that list and with the skills, I was also trying to do some characterization-via-stats. Personally speaking, I believe that stats can also serve as a form of characterization, although I also understand people who want stats to be only and always the mechanical information they need to play and nothing more.
*On A Lighter (oh god enumberance pun) Note*
Damien Knight is wearing too much armor for his body, and is encumbered – but it isn't factored into his statblock
I interpreted the armor modification options in Attitude (p. 160) as working the same way that helmets, shields, the PP system, and anything else with a "+" in front of the armor value do, and effectively not counting towards encumbrance. If they count towards encumbrance and nothing else with a + in front of it does, then that is quite an inconsistency.