How do you handle this?

According to L5R 4th. ed. Core rules p.95 tab. 2.7 the average Imperial samurai has Status 3.

What do you do with such characters at pc creation?

Give Status 3 For free?

Make the social position advantage work at double benefit (+2 status)?

I personally give Status 2 For free and give a discount (4pts instead than 6) on the social advantage cost.

I Know other people just ignore the issue.

Others even not allow Imperial Family Samurai since they are optional.

What do you do?

If all PCs are Imperial, then they only have to take the Social Position Advantage once and I give the other point of Status for free.

or

If one or more PCs are Imperial but others are not, they have to take the Social Position Advantage twice instead of once to get the all three points of Statue.

However...

Sadly, from my experience, I had one player took advantage of being a a high Statue character (since he bought the Advantage) and would boss/take advantage/used/etc some of the lower Statue PCs. It got so bad that I and other GMs had to banned any Status base advantages unless everyone is playing the same starting Status.

Point being, Status is a weapon depending on who you talk to or where you are. Honestly, I'm glad the Social Position Advantage cost a lot. Your experience may differ.

As per the rules and the FAQ of 3rd and 4th edition, a PC imperial family player is not an average member of the Imperial families and start with the same status rank as any other character, so 1.

Nothing in the rules prevent them from buying two times the advantage to start with an higher status and match the average status of a member of the Imperial families. You may want to discuss it with your player, as pointed out by the previous poster, some people can overplay it.

Nothing in the rules prevent them from buying two times the advantage

Technically, it's that precise 'nothing in the rules' that could be read as preventing them from taking it twice without GM override. Even advantages within the same set are by default off limits, so it's not particularly out there to read this one similarly.

The FAQ specifically said you can, and as the rule per written, it is not forbidden. As far as I remember, we also did not had a problem with people buying two times in playtest, as long as the GM was ok with higher status characters.

I'm not sure which faq you're referring to, but as I mentioned - "GM override".

Or more specifically from the core book;

The GM is of course entitled to override these restrictions if he wishes, but such decisions should not be made lightly, since combining these Advantages and Disadvantages can have an unbalancing effect on game play.

In my gaming group the rule of thumb is free Status 3.0 and Different Schools (if the player so desires) when it comes to Imperial characters. Tho abusing Status around here is pretty darn hard because of setting rules, so I can't even remember if I have ever seen a player character doing that.

Imperial Families in L5R have been handled so poorly, it really is difficult to know. Everything about them is contradictory.

Think about it. You have effectively a Great Clan here that starts with 3 families. Its the ONLY one that is never going to be involved in war to lose their lives. They may not have lands, per se, but they are supported by the taxes of the other clans. Certainly there are those marrying out of the family, but everything ought to indicate that twice as many are trying to marry into it.

And they kind of do need their numbers-- they are the ones who ultimately represent the emperor. You need to have them in every court across the land, you need to have them serving as the judges for inter-clan disputes which surely pop up on a regular basis, they need to be out there monitoring collecting of taxes, keeping track of the imperial laws and being the ultimate interpreters of it. Not to mention, they are serving in the Imperial Legions, working as the Imperial Magistrates, guarding the temples and the treasures they hold that are for the Emperor and those with his blessing only.

I don't think it ever really occurred to those designing the the schools for Otomo, Seppun and Miya just how diverse the duties the Imperial Families really had to have been doing. Instead we get these far, FAR too narrow "turning clans against each other" and "guarding the Emperor and ONLY the Emperor, not the Empress or the heir and certainly never anyone else" themes...

I guess it is inevitable as they basically never had a Stronghold, were never a faction and thus no one was supposed to care or be invested in them-- they were just used as faction-neutral villains. And we are told that despite every bit of common sense saying "The number of direct servants of the emperor are going to be at least as numerous as those of any single clan, just spread really thinly throughout the empire", instead because there was no intention of making them regularly occurring characters, we are told they are smaller than any of the minor clans-- including that one that just started yesterday.

At a certain point, you either have to go "common sense" or "assume that the weird contradictory things the books say are somehow all simultaneously true".

Going common sense? Well.. hey, you might be an "Otomo" and maybe that once meant something, but really-- you are just the kid of what is effectively the accountant working for the imperial bureau out of minor Crab Clan province... even at the height of Hantei reign you'd maybe have 1 status over the son of an honorable Crab Clan member from the same province, but this many generations after the fall of the Hantei and your family being pushed out of basically all influential positions? There really is not status advantage.

If you presume all the contradictory things are somehow true? Well, I guess you are one of the 10 or so Seppun from your entire generation and you were definitely born in the capital and you have several status ranks above anyone else.

Of course, here is the thing though.... "Average"... What exactly does it mean by "Average Imperial Family Member"? And, keep in mind, that chart is not timeline specific. Either the "the Imperial Family members are as common as the Mantis or Spider clans despite claims to the contrary, they are just really spread out so no one can take a census and those starting out at status 1 are not unusual at all by the time the Spider Clan exists, its just that the mean average throughout the history of the empire is high because they used to tend to get fast tracked and so had lots of high status members skewing the average" or it could mean "anyone lower than this rank is an aberration and their ancestors must have done something dishonorable". (Though, really, can anyone from the Otomo be not descended from someone dishonorable at this point?)

The claim of "Average Status 3" is also a really weird claim if one remembers that the Miya ALSO count as an Imperial Family. Surely no one really raises an eyebrow that a recently graduated Miya courier is only status 1.