I do not know if there exist rules for elder Kuei-Jin chargen. So I'll try to summarize the Kin-jin (Kindred) rules.
This one is from Dark Ages: Vampire which, methinks, has the latest incarnation of downtime maturation rules.
The basic idea is that in downtime characters are much less active than when blood flows freely.
Characters get Maturation points based on the time spent in any given downtime period, as below.
- 1-5 years -> 1 per year (1-5 pts)
- 6-35 years -> 1 per 5 years (6-10 pts)
- 36-135 years -> 1 per 10 years (11-20 pts)
- 136-500 years -> 1 per 20 years (21-40 pts)
- 501-750 years -> 1 per 25 years (41-50 pts)
- 751+ years -> 1 per 30 years (51+ pts)
Maturation Points (MPs) may be spent at basically the same rates as XPs. But for elder vampires (above 200 years), XP costs increase (but MP costs don't).
It is very complicated, and is even more so as Maturation Point gains and costs depend on the character's activity level in any given century/decade. You should check out the Dark Ages: Storyteller's Companion, pp. 69-75.
If you want less complexity, you can design elders from scratch as you would a neonate, just with more points. The rules are also in the same book, on pp. 75-77. Summary is as follows:
- Attributes: 10 / 7 / 5 (above the free rating of 1 in each)
- Abilities: 20 / 12 / 8
- Advantages: 10 Discipline dots (min. half in clan), 15 Background dost, 7 Virtue dots (above the free rating of 1 in each), base generation is 9th
- Road rating (Humanity, what-have-you) is decreased by 1 for every 150 years of activity
- Freebies: 30 pts for a basic elder of 201-350 years, plus 15 pts for every 150 years of beingg active (meaning loss of Road)
Now, as to the Kuei-Jin, you may proceed with the XP-MP method, which is quite straightforward, as XP is XP in both on the East and the West side.
If you go with the chargen-build method, Attributes, Abilities, Backgrounds and freebies should be as above for Kindred, and I'd give 7 free dots in Disciplines, 6 for Chi Virtues and 2 for Soul Virtues (and the free basic dots as for young characters). And then spend the truckload of freebies as per the KotE core book. I checked some elder Kuei-Jin NPCs in the Tokyo and Hong Kong books, and their freebie levels (very approximative) seem to take them to the upper echelons of their corresponding dharmic age ranges.
Page 79 of V20 clearly states the numbers that you are looking for in a text box called "Advancing New Characters":
Advancing New Characters
Storytellers may choose to allow players to create more experienced and knowledgeable characters. Indeed, players of Vampire: The Masquerade 20th Anniversary Edition may prefer an “ancilla game” or an all-elders chronicle instead. In this case, we recommend first building a neonate character and then granting players a number of experience points that allows them to increase their characters’ Traits to levels suitable to the chronicle and the age of their vampires.
As a basic rule of thumb, “idle” Kindred should have a number of Discipline dots equal to the square root of her age. Remember that players’ characters are rarely “idle” like Storyteller characters, so they’ll rapidly outpace this guideline. That’s fine; they’re out there in the world, having exciting encounters and earning more experience than passive Storyteller characters. Remember that the cost for raising a Trait which is already advanced can be very expensive.
See p. 124 for more information on spending experience points.
Kindred Age Category: Experience Points
Neonate: 0-35
Ancilla: 75-220
Elder: 250-600
Methuselahs: 1000+
I would think of this "rule of thumb" as just a limit of how many disciplines may be bought with XP. For example, if a typical Camarilla fledgling generates with 3 disciplines (up to 5), let's say that he has spent 80 years as an "idle" vampire and has 150 bonus XP. He could theoretically buy a lot of discipline points with that! But is limited to a square root of his age, which is ~9. And he may only buy up to 6, as he already has 3 that he got during generation.
If the Storyteller assumes that the character was not "idle" but rather as active as typical player character during that time, the Storyteller is free do provide bonus XP and no limit on discipline dots.
Best Answer
I'm running a game that blends VtM V20 and 2ed. In that game I have a few considerations:
For player characters I think that it should mostly be dictated by roleplaying experience more than age. If they want new rituals, it becomes a matter of finding the resources and then enough game time passing. We usually treat this sort of thing as an extended roll. For my group, this exact scenario hasn't come up because we don't have any serious magic users.
For NPCs I have two tracks. For NPCs in the city's "milieu" (which means they exist for the players to interact with but aren't major agents in the plot without player intervention) I mostly build the character according to the standard character creation rules and then give one ritual per dot in any magical path (not discipline) of equal or lesser level than the character's overall corresponding Discipline rating.
For major NPCs (those that drive the plot with or without player intervention) it's pure storyteller need. The rituals themselves are really not balanced well within or between sorcerous Disciplines, so I don't like limiting such important characters while creating them-- the builds end up too fragile to deal with players taking the story off the rails, and useless rituals are a waste. I do try to stick to the one-ritual-per-magic-path-dot, as with milieu characters, but I don't assign all of the specific rituals right away.
I'll give major characters rituals that the character "would know", in the sense that if the character regularly does something a ritual supports or makes possible, then the character knows it and this "uses up" one of the allotted rituals. The rest are fluid until they are needed. This flexibility remains until the chapter in which the players first meet the character ends (more or less), and then the rest of the fluid rituals are assigned to ones I think fit their concepts and backstories or they are lost. For high-level rituals I might require the NPC to devote resources to discovering/learning them "off camera", but that ties in with some other house systems I use.
TL;DR: The rituals an NPC knows (and their number) should support the needs of the story first and foremost regardless of any guideline. After that I aim roughly for one ritual per path dot, loosely adjusted for the NPC's access to ritual knowledge, inclination to study, and relevant Attributes, Abilities (primarily Intelligence and Occult, but others sometimes apply), and Disciplines.