My update, I have 5 playtests to go. I have an ordered list of abilities I want to test (I won't get to all of them, but that's okay). I'm happy with my missions, and might try to squeeze one more in. The rulebook just went through a major edit, and Sarah is going to look at it. And, I have a campaign mode I'm happy with.
On that, the campaign mode...
I've always had a few goals in my campaign:
1) Battlefield deaths feel heavy (e.g. if a party is losing, they don't keep fighting to earn extra experience)
2) Games are varied (e.g. if I play four games against my brother, they feel distinct, rather than like one game with three rematches)
3) There is an end condition.
For (3), I've decided to stay with the Illeria as a former prison colony backstory. I've gone through different ideas, and what I finally came to was that the characters know of a way to escape (e.g. crafting a magic flying boat or building a teleporter), but doing so is resource-intensive. So, they battle over alchemical resources to craft their items from, and escape when they collect enough.
For (2), a given game has 5 characters, but groups 12 that they can pick from. Because of this, you will field a different party every game.
For (1), if a character dies in battle, there is a decent chance they die permanently. This links with the 12 characters thing, because it builds in a buffer: if a character dies, you still have 11 left.
So, then comes the nitty-gritty of how to do a campaign. To test my ideas, I created a campaign simulator. I made a party of 12 characters, and named them after PS1-era Final Fantasy characters (I figured I'd care more if I saw "Tifa dies" instead of "Character 3 dies"). Then, I made a simulation that did everything except the game:
1) I picked 5 characters to fight.
2) The simulator randomly determined if I won (50/50 chance), and picked who died in battle (based on death rates in playtests).
3) It determined whether a character that died in battle if they died permanently, gained permanent injuries, or was fine.
4) It randomly assigned me whatever spoils I got from the battle.
5) It gave me the choice of how to assign experience points, and if someone levels up, gives them pre-made abilities.
6) It determines how many resources I consumed, and if needed, what would happen with foraging.
7) It determined if the party persisted; if so, repeat.
I ran this for a number of campaigns, and then decided how I liked the results. I would then tweak how steps #3-7 worked. I made a few interested discoveries.
I wanted parties to consume some kind of resource (step 6), to put a timer on things. This was meant to be like the ante in poker: a reason to not sit out most games. I tried versions where I tracked this on a broad and a minute level, and I found that I liked using the broadest level possible. What I came up with was that 1 unit of "rations" feeds the entire party after a game. If you win a game you get a perishable ration, if you lose you need to eat one of your dry rations. If you run out of dry resources, then you need to forage, and foraging often results in misfortune. I like this because it is simple, and it puts a clock on the number of games that you can lose.
Spoils (step 4) took a good bit of adjusting. I elected to have the win condition be collect X alchemical resources, and so I needed to tweak what X was, and how many you could get in a game. For a while, it was 1 if you won, and 0 if you lost. I eventually decided to make it 2 if you won, 1 if you had a minor loss, and 0 if you had a major loss. I did this to keep people in battle, so that even if they knew they would lose, they would still fight for that one bit of resource. It also felt better to get 1, and much more interesting if the number of resources was not just the number of wins. I also tweaked how many rewards parties got (besides the resources). After a few tests, I settled on the winning party got 2, and the losing party got 1. For the winner, 3 was too many and 1 was not enough. For the loser, it really felt bad get nothing.
I haven't changed my leveling-up system (step 5), and I've always really liked it. Basically, after each game you get a certain number of training dice, which you assign amongst your characters, and if you roll high enough, they gain a level.
Death took some tweaking, to get it moderately punishing. I ended on characters die on a dice roll of 4+, or 5+ if they are level 3, or 6 if they are level 5. Each time they die in battle but not permanently, it usually increases their chance of dying permanently. I debated whether to have the chance of dying always increase, or just usually (i.e. on the roll of a 1, nothing happens). Usually felt so much better psychologically, however, it had little impact on the long-term probability of survival (i.e. how many times a level 1, 3, or 5 character could die in battle before dying permanently); so, I kept it.
Okay, almost 1000 words. Almost there. This is exciting!!!
