The player decides when it's time for the character to step away between Years. The rules for Successors are important for the next character, but there's no more rules beyond that for retirement.
It's hard for me not to write reams and reams about my favourite martial arts movies. If you're just starting out I'd suggest these three films that I most often hear from people as, "This is what made me fall in love with martial arts movies." Each of them come from very different places and do very different things.
- Bloodsport (1988)
- Enter the Dragon (1973)
- The 36th Chamber of Shaolin (1978)
Beyond those films, my suggestion for exploring martial arts movies is to start early and work you way forward. If you start with Ong-Bak (2003) or Ip Man (2008) or The Raid: Redemption (2011), or Blood and Bone (2009)—all truly great in their own right—you won't have as much context to appreciate them than if you went on a bit of a journey with it.
If you fall in love with the technical complexity of Hong Kong martial arts films—and how could you not—then I say start with Five Fingers of Death (1972), which really popularized the genre internationally. Then you should go through Bruce Lee's Hong Kong films, which happened soon after, because he's an icon with good reason. From there, look to the Shaw Brothers and Golden Harvest films. Some of my personal favourites are:
- The Prodigal Son (1981)
- The Five Deadly Venoms (1975).
- Snake in the Eagle's Shadow (1978)
- Master of the Flying Guillotine (1976)
- Duel to the Death (1982)
If you instead want to explore the emotional depth that Western martial arts films are capable of capturing, it doesn't get better than Walter Hill's Charles Bronson movie Hard Times (1975). This is maybe an atypical start because most of the genre from the Western perspective is dominated by a very different feeling of low budget, direct-to-video movies that are nonetheless infectious with their martial enthusiasm. That's a whole journey very much on its own, and a great journey—Cynthia Rothrock is an under-appreciated master of her craft.
You're lucky. You'd be getting into martial arts movies at a time when they're a lot easier to find, now. I can't tell you how we used to freak out when raiding a Chinatown shop to find an import VHS of Drunken Master II (1994).
Have a great time.