I'm just tossing out some thoughts here, but I think since it's a yakuza/organised crime situation and not a military, the reason for the loose interpretation of ranks is that it is not a hard, set in stone chain of command.
Ryouma having 3* influence in one area he personally has a lot of influence in might get him somewhere in one plot but in other areas he will get nothing no matter who he is because his rank doesn't carry the same weight with every NPC or situation he deals with. In fact, his rank and visibility has been such a hindrance to him personally gaining information that he has had to adjust and delegate information gathering to other characters because he doesn't have the skills or people just know his stupid face. He tried to use that influence to get information out of Kaberou twice and it didn't work, but another much newer character was able to get really useful stuff because he had a better skillset, which is cool!
A reason why characters with no rank or low rank getting highly sensitive missions might be that they have a good skill set for it or because a faction leader might want them to prove themselves. This is not an uncommon thing in this genre and a lot of these genre flavour things make things more interesting, in my opinion.
This is mostly what I'm thinking when the mods are suggesting that people get creative about how they access information regardless of what rank their character has. If something doesn't work, you can always try something else and ranks shouldn't be necessarily seen as a requirement. Setting up "must be 2 stars to apply" type missions sound nice but would probably end up gate keeping a lot more people than it encourages.
That being said, the Department of the Enma probably DOES have way more of a chain of command, so it might be interesting to come up with more faction flavour to flesh some of those things out specifically?
no subject
Ryouma having 3* influence in one area he personally has a lot of influence in might get him somewhere in one plot but in other areas he will get nothing no matter who he is because his rank doesn't carry the same weight with every NPC or situation he deals with. In fact, his rank and visibility has been such a hindrance to him personally gaining information that he has had to adjust and delegate information gathering to other characters because he doesn't have the skills or people just know his stupid face. He tried to use that influence to get information out of Kaberou twice and it didn't work, but another much newer character was able to get really useful stuff because he had a better skillset, which is cool!
A reason why characters with no rank or low rank getting highly sensitive missions might be that they have a good skill set for it or because a faction leader might want them to prove themselves. This is not an uncommon thing in this genre and a lot of these genre flavour things make things more interesting, in my opinion.
This is mostly what I'm thinking when the mods are suggesting that people get creative about how they access information regardless of what rank their character has. If something doesn't work, you can always try something else and ranks shouldn't be necessarily seen as a requirement. Setting up "must be 2 stars to apply" type missions sound nice but would probably end up gate keeping a lot more people than it encourages.
That being said, the Department of the Enma probably DOES have way more of a chain of command, so it might be interesting to come up with more faction flavour to flesh some of those things out specifically?