Guys, you recall what were the guidelines to create a character at a higher insight rank? Was it +50xp after character generation for an IR 2 character? +75xp for an IR 3? And so on?
[RPG] Character creation at a higher IR
According to Unexpected Allies, it comes down to "backtracing" Insight points and make the players increase Rings and take Skills until they hit the desired Insight Rank then give them some XP to fine-tailor their characters.
It is worth mentioning that pure +XP won't work because buying Advantages or rocket-boosting Traits from the XP won't increase the Insight Rank, and Skill purchases can also screw with the math.
The biggest problem your going to have is that Insight Rank is a very vague kind of ranking system. Are you asking for a low-Rank 2 character or a borderline-Rank 3? Is that character one with a lot of Advantages or none?
I once found a True Ronin character at Rank 3 and took it apart to see how the math held up, the result was that after breaking it down the character had spent 224 Exp in total to get to Rank 3 (and was slightly between rank 3 and 4). then i built a character with the same experience and ended up lower 2.
So to confirm what Auto said picking a set amount of experience will not yield stable result at the best of times....BUT if can build a character at that Insight Rank with that amount of experience then it is at least possible for others to get similar results.
A thing, I feel should be said, is that you shouldn't really 'force' your Players to be at a certain Insight Rank since its only a small skip away from telling them how to build 'their' characters (and part of the fun of any RPG is making the character yours). Let them play out their character the way they built them and if there are serious problems latter let them adjust accordingly after coming to that conclusion themselves.
Thanks guys. I wanted to create an npc atbleast one rank higher to be an antagonist for one of the characters (a courtier) who took the sworn enemy disadvantage. I did not wanted just to create a name with only some skill numbers but something more substantial.
Thanks guys. I wanted to create an npc atbleast one rank higher to be an antagonist for one of the characters (a courtier) who took the sworn enemy disadvantage. I did not wanted just to create a name with only some skill numbers but something more substantial.
That is a good idea Kakita Shiro.
For my NPC I use my PCs as a guideline, for a newcomer PC in an already existing campaign, I recalculate how much exp the example NPC in unexpected allies had to be the appropriate rank.
kinzen (I think???) had a chart with different levels of rings/skills (there was a power build, a balanced build, and a skill build) that corresponded with middle of the level insight points for each rank starting at second.
It basically said you have this many rings at this much and this many skills at this much.
there were no points to buy "non-insight" items (advantages, kata, etc.), so I came up with some on my own.
it also followed along with kinzen's idea that school skills should be important to the character and their rank needed to be as high as their next rank to obtain the next technique (or something close to that).
I really like it. It helps mainly with NPCs creation and does decent as a starting point for PCs for me.
I remember Kinzen's post, and I agree that was useful. I regret not saving it.
I do remember another member I think it was I sawa Mizuhiko (sp?, memory fails me) that started or was of another thread like that.