Jane
Ask yourself how many games or sessions or game years you will play between the runts starting out and the glorious heroes ascending to the adulation of the masses or whatever the target is. Divide the number of HP needed to achieve adulation worthyness by number of games/sessions/years and give that many HP each game/session/year. This assumes you dont go with a saga system but just give out HP and let the players spend it as normal.
FYI after 5+ years play we are at the 400-500 HP stage IIRC. We have a few skills at 10w2-10w3. Best affinity probably 15w. We are technically best in clan-ish because we dont have the breadth of good skills.
Get the book(s) with the advanced npcs down. Spend a hour doing a rough count of HP required to buy the skills (ie no of pts over 17 for each skill). Dont bother being accurate since you probably are looking at many hundreds of HP. Get a feel for the number of HP required to achieve the levels you are thinking of. Do the division to get a per game/session/year figure. Add one for HP spent bumping. QED.
All my books are packed for a move else I would do an example to see if it works out.
When letting players spend tel them how many spends they have. We do this to regulate the spread of skills. We give on av 3 hp each night we play. But often many night go past thn all the accrued HP are given at the end of a sub-story. So we may have played 5 monday nights and then get (say) 20hp and two spends. Meaning we can increase a normal ability by 1 for 1HP, 2 for 2HP, 3 for 4HP, 4 for 6HP, etc. Ie as if we had been granted two smaller sets of HP, so really this is by the book. We tend to have less spends than actual evenings play; you could have more. The key is that the number of spends is small compared to the number of points to the degree that you want to force the players to spread the HP across many abilities.
If this would mean giving out a large number of HP at once then stick to a sage system as its easier. The maths can still bedone the same way though.
Basically: stuff whats 'realistic' because its justnot relevant; go with whats going to work with the game world and real world timescales of your group.
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