Suggestions for making Path to Glory more fun/slightly more balanced

[wayniac]

Sadly in my area 8th edition and, for some reason, the General's Handbook 2017 killed off AOS.  I'm thinking of pitching a Path to Glory campaign to my GW to try and rekindle some interest in it.  I'd want to run it mostly by the book, but with a few additions to try and add a little more balance so people don't immediately slag the idea as not being points-based (and, therefore, "not fair"). 

So first, could I get a bit of C&C on the following proposed house rules:

• (Still debating this one) Followers are randomly generated rather than chosen; if you roll a result you don't own you can re-roll
• No battalions allowed even if you get the followers to field one
• Battle Traits from the relevant battletome/GHB2017 will be used.  Your leader can take a Command Trait and an Artefact, and this remains the same for the duration of the campaign (i.e. it becomes part of your warband roster).  If you later must choose a new leader, you can pick a new command trait and/or artefact for the new leader.
• Followers represent your warband's roster, not their unit composition, and you can choose how to field your units in each battle.  For example, if you had two units of 5 Liberators in your warband, you could opt for each battle to field one unit of 10 Liberators or 2 units of 5 Liberators.  This choice must be decided during deployment and you must inform your opponent how you are fielding the followers.
• The Rules of One from matched play are in effect
• Summoning does NOT require reinforcement points, but have the following changes in addition to any restrictions outlined in the Path to Glory book:
  • You may not summon anything with the MONSTER keyword
  • Any summoning spell can alternatively be used to replenish a unit rather than summon a new one (e.g. if you successfully summon 10 skeletons, you could instead opt to replenish an existing unit of skeletons in your warband instead of creating a new unit)
  • Replenishing (whether via summoning or abilities) can not take a unit past it's starting size as indicated on your roster; in this case any excess models are lost.
  • Each time you successfully cast a summoning spell, roll a d6:  On a 1-3 you cannot cast any further summoning spells that battle as whatever mechanism you use to summon (e.g. portal to the Realm of Chaos/Azyr, conduit to the underworlds of Shyish, etc.) is temporarily exhausted.  Each successful summoning spell incurs a cumulative -1 penalty to this roll (such that 3 times would be the maximum before the roll would auto-fail).  Abilities that are not summoning spells that create new units (e.g. Pink Horrors splitting) do not count for this.

Second, I am hearing that the Path to Glory scenarios are not the greatest, so I'm looking for suggestions on what other scenarios work well.  I am not sure yet if I want to have missions randomly generated each battle, or have them set for each week so any suggestions on how others have ran this would be appreciated. For fluff purposes I'm thinking of having the campaign take place in a predetermined realm and use the additional spells (but maybe not the crazy additonal rules) from GH2017.

Third, given the relatively small size of Path to Glory warbands, how hard would it be to use 4x4 tables instead of 6x4?  This would allow 2 games to go on simultaneously at the store as there is only one 8x4 AOS table available for use.

[Thundercake]

I think the summoning rules sound great.

[Kramer]

I never finished our PtG campaign but from the games we played a couple of things:

1. Summoning is indeed prone to 'unfair' use. A simple only summon once per battle should suffice although your summoning suggestion seems more thorough. 
2. No battalions but with the alliance rules intact seems good. 
3. Rules of one sounds fair. 
4. Merging units is a good suggestion we also used. 

But all in all. You are trying to balance a set up that's in of itself unbalanced. Rolling for a warband get's you warbands that a roughly the same points. But as unit upgrades don't have points you get a discrepancy after the first few rolls. If people aren't into that it's going to be hard to convince them any additions to the rules will negate that. 

If you really think this will prevent people from joining in, you might be better of running an escalation league. (the first warband will be around 500pt anyway. But start at 500 and add 250pt at every interval).