Epicenter

It's interesting you say that. From a character point of view, I've always seen Disciple as a fawning-fanboi for your character. That's great if you're looking to have a little horde of sycophants following you around (this seems pretty popular among DSers), but Handmaiden has always seemed like a more interesting character to me. She has the whole thing about not using her real name, being rejected by her half-sisters, and being stuck with her oaths when she has dreams and aspirations beyond just being an Echani sister. The Disciple also has that vile English accent that reminds me of some pretentious college or high school theatre major.

I like Mira, but she is missing a lot of her depth. I think it's worse because Avellone's used a lot of the archetypes he had in Planescape: Torment for the KotoR2 characters to the point where you can make some pretty direct equivalancies between characters from the two games. "

Ah, excellent. That's even a better solution. Thanks a bunch!

It's a bug. You surrendered to Handmaiden when she first confronted you when you entered the Telos Academy. You get a lightside point, but your conversation ends there. Reload from a game before then, and do something like ask her who she is instead of surrendering right off of the bat. You'll find the game works a lot better after that.

Maybe it doesn't affect the Exile her/himself? If I play LS, I'm like the paragon of the LS and I um...blast the living daylights out of Hssis in that chamber to get ten levels, sometimes more. I've never dropped from Light Mastery in any of my playthroughs. After that, I use Force Lightning to clear out Trayus Academy, except in a few instances where I like to watch the lightsaber fighting animations.

I would have to reply to your question with another. From the cave in Korriban in KotoR2, we know that Malak has a whiny **** Dastardly / Dr. Evil voice. He's like the anti-inspiration. If he asked you to go disobey the Jedi Council and fight the Mandalorians, would you?

Actually, there's nothing preventing a LS Jedi from doing it. After my first playthrough, I reguarly go into the cave to rack up a few levels to get some choice powers I didn't have before (or enough stat points to play R2D2 with T3 which requires a INT of 15+). It's only a little more fiddly than doing it as a DS Jedi. By that time you're doing the caves, you usually have the YOURNAME crystal in your lightsaber which gives you ... +wisdom. Your Force Points can't go less than zero, so there's a bug you can exploit here. Step into the room. Blast all the Hssis in the room until your LSer has no FPs left. Switch weapons to your second weapons set (this is usually fists for me). This drops your Wisdom score (and thus gives you less Force Points). You cannot have less than 0 Force Points, so it adjusts it to 0. Switch back to your lightsaber(s). KotoR2 will recompute your force total with your +WIS items and give you a small bit of your Force Total back (usually enough for one or two uses of Force Lightning). Keep doing this until all the Hssis are dead. Then repeat for as many levels as you want. This also works elsewhere in the cave test, it's just less important elsewhere.

Bao-Dur isn't hard to convert, probably the easiest after Mira, but he can be a bit tricky since his stats aren't the greatest so people don't take him along. Simply put, you simply have to have him along at certain points in the game where you can get influence with him. You don't get influence with the guy for talking with him. I think you need like only two or three influence raises with him then he's yours. It's easiest to do this on Dantoonie as a LS or neutral character. Make sure he's with you when you get the quest to find the atmospheric sensors in the Kinrath Cave (a.k.a. "Crystal Cave"). He'll volunteer to look at them and when he finds the spy devices, be sure to tell him he did a good job (if your skills are high enough you can do it yourself and he'll be impressed anyway). Once you're done doing whatever stuff you went to the cave to do, step back outside and go back and talk to the militia fellow who gave you the quest. Be sure not to have anyone else in your party that might "sponge" the influence conversation. It doesn't always happen, but a lot of influence oppurtunities are only triggered for one NPC. If you want to be sure, remove the third person for your party for your conversation. When you speak with the Militia fellow, bring up the fact you found the spy sensors and make the guy come clean. When he offers you 5,000 for them, tell him they need the money and only take 3,000 (I think it's 3,000). When the conversation ends, Bao-Dur will be impressed with you again. Then start talking with Bao-Dur over and over again. Once you get the line "I think you're having an effect on me, General" you have him. You might need another influence raise, but I don't think so. If you do, places where you can get influence with him (off of the top of my head) are helping the Mandalorian on Dxun and helping with the airspeeder on Nar Shaada.