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I'm working on a long-term E6/E8 (probably E8) campaign and long story short, I'm planning to implement some ideas from a boardgame called Gloomhaven (if you haven't heard of it, check it out, it's pretty cool). In it, when you pick a character to play, you also get a special quest to complete, and if you complete it you unlock something like a new character to play as.
The closest analogy to this that I can see working in a d20 game is gaining access to a prestige class. Except that even being E8, there's little use to prestige classes. So to facilitate this, I'm thinking of having prestige class levels being granted as sort of retroactive gestalt class levels. In an effort to keep things from getting too complicated, I kind of want to allow taking these prestige gestalt levels following the same rules as post-6th-level feats. Obviously, a prestige class level would often be better than a mere feat, but I figure this will probably be evened out to at least acceptably unbalanced levels considering the typically stricter requirements for entering prestige classes as well as the need to quest to unlock them, akin to questing for powerful magic items in a typical game. In fact, I'm considering loosening or even removing the prestige class requirements given the difficulty in unlocking them in the first place - would really suck to gain access to, say, the Horizon Walker or Shadow Dancer class after a long period of questing only to realize that no one in the party has put ranks into Knowledge (geography) or Perform (dance).
Thoughts?
If a particular prestige class is associated with a particular quest, would you give the player the quest/PrC, or would they pick it? If it's your call, would you be careful to balance them for the player's actual class/build (obviously some class combos are better than others), if it's theirs would they know the exact PrC before picking the quest?
Are the quests given to one character or shared by the party?
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A fair bit of TBD, to be honest. I've come up with good reasons to go different ways on many of these things.
I do intend for players to have options, with the available adventure options growing and branching out organically, and with it being entirely up to them where they wish to go for the next adventure. But at the same time, I'd like there to be some degree of framework to fall back on to push them into some sort of direction, and so that which adventures they choose to do means something rather than just allowing them to do all of them, given enough time. So I'm thinking that there will be a combination of "declared" quests that the players are aware of from the start (with the possibility of a couple of options to pick from), and hidden quests that they can stumble across and discover unintentionally.
I plan to make the PrCs and assign them to their respective quests ahead of time, but as for whether or not they'd know beforehand... On the one hand, it would suck for them to unlock a PrC that no one even has interest in taking (though I plan for this to be a campaign where characters are periodically cycled out, and anything unlocked previously will always be available, so there's always potential that a future character may be interested), but I also want to preserve some room for discovery. So I'm thinking that maybe I'll let them know what the class is and the general idea of what it does, but not let them look over the actual mechanics. And while I don't intend for this to happen, this approach would also let me tweak the class if I see any potentially broken combos on the horizon.
And there would almost certainly be quests both for the party as a whole, as well as for the individual characters. Things run so much more smoothly when the party has a collective goal, but I also like to allow players to have their day in the sun. PrC unlocks would generally be for the party as a whole, though, while the individual player-focused quests would probably award things like magic items or a special bonus feat for that character.
I'm still in the brainstorming phase here, of course, so this is largely spit-balling. (On that note, other suggestions for both party and character rewards are greatly appreciated.)
Other obvious rewards - land, titles, a flaming burst katana with history and a gem-studded scabbard, etc. Some feats might require special training or circumstances, e.g. hamatulatsu or nymph's kiss. I don't know how you're doing crafting but one possible limit on the likes of Craft Wondrous Item is needing to find or make 'recipes' for specific magic items. Some of that you mentioned, just thinking.
PrC unlocks for the party, partial info available in advance, OK. That should be enough to achieve some kind of balance between characters.
Generally speaking people don't want to dump characters unless they're stuck in a rut or badly overshadowed by another character IME. Is it different with some of the people you game with?
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A bit yes, a bit no. They're mostly relatively new to tabletop RPGs (about a year or so), and so several have a ton of character ideas that they want to try out, so there's that. But... well, I'm referring to this as a single campaign, but in scope and structure, it'll be more like several consecutive campaigns within the same setting, history, etc. The length of time that's spanned in-universe would make a single, continuous party a bit odd (though certainly not untenable), however if they were to use the same characters all the way through, they could probably easily end up with at least 30 or 40 post-E6/8 feats apiece. At the very least, long enough to allow fully leveling up four or five E6/8 characters back-to-back.
As such, I'm also trying to come up with a system to encourage players to "retire" a character and roll up a new one (again, much like in Gloomhaven, which is a big reason that lead me to mine it for ideas*), but without making it mechanically obligatory (that is, the benefits of retiring significantly outweighing the benefits of not retiring). Hopefully, this would lead players retiring their characters individually depending solely on whether or not that player feels like it, as opposed to everyone choosing whether or not to retire as a group, and so for the party to contain both veteran and new characters at any given time. But finding such a sweet spot has proven to be frustratingly elusive.
* In spite of this, Gloomhaven is not particularly helpful in this regard. It has obligatory character retirement, pending the completion of your character's personal quest. The only way to delay this is by avoiding the quest objectives. Which can be fine for a certain amount of time, however because encounter difficulty is a function of average party level, you're strongly encouraged by the rest of the party to retire a character before they get too over-leveled. All which (mandatory retirement upon completing quest objectives, pressure to retire sooner rather than later, etc.) works perfectly well for a boardgame like Gloomhaven, but I'd rather avoid for an RPG.