In a campaign I recently ran, a rogue/assassin run by one of my players betrayed the party. He only partially disguised the fact that he was an assassin, so the party was always a little wary of him. However, he had always participated in combats and done little (that they ever spotted or knew about) to betray their trust. Secretly, he stole a couple of critical artifacts from party members while they slept in camp and it was his watch. His betrayal also waited for the party to enter into a major combat (3.5e rules btw).
During the first couple of rounds of combat the party's main fighter was slain (taken to something like -25 HP). When the fighter went down, the assassin passed me a note that he was holding his action for the cleric's attempt to raise him. The party's cleric was about to cast Revenance to restore him to life when the assassin let loose his sneak attack. The cleric's spell was wasted, the fighter remained dead and the cleric had no other spell prepared to help that day. The bard was about to use the artifact (a Zagyg's token which would have provided a limited wish) to revive the fallen fighter or restore the cleric's spell, only to discover that he could not find it any longer (having been stolen by the assassin in the previous night's camp). The rest of the party fled, pausing only long enough to kill the betrayer.
A couple other ideas he had were to secretly replace the party's magical weapons with non-magical replicas. I ruled the in-game story & timeline wouldn't allow him enough time to carry out that plan, but it might be an idea for you. He also got the party's fighter to accept an intelligent, magical weapon as his main weapon. The weapon did not reveal itself and later (long after the assassin's death) took control of the fighter to carry out its own agenda, thus slipping the betrayal even further into the party and story.
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.
Best Answer
If you will have other monsters in the encounter with you then talk to your DM. Have him set the XP budget for the encounter and then price yourself accordingly based on the other creatures in the encounter.
PCs are probably worth a variable amount depending on how much stuff they have, the quality of feats they have taken and the optimization of their character. Most likely a L14 character is probably worth significantly less than a L14 Solo. However, they are probably worth more than the average L14 monster of their same role.
Therefore, it makes more sense to me to figure out the XP needs of the encounter and just set the PC XP to fall within the budget, rather than trying to figure out exactly how much the PC is worth.