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As in, if your commander does this special objective during the last game, he gets this bonus throughout the rest of the campaign.

What I'm thinking is incorporating special objectives that don't count towards regular victory points, but could be useful to get because of the bonuses they give in later rounds.

So maybe find a piece of wargear that you can nominate one model to have, or if you get these psychic crystals you can make a model a psyker in some dicipline, etc. Maybe some negative modifiers to balance them out? Or would it be balanced just because of the opportunity cost of not using your troops to get the normal objectives?

And do you think these would be best to only be able to be given to the commander or anyone?

Should there be any requirement on keeping the armies the same (like you have to keep an HQ and Troops the same throughout, but you can switch up everything else).

Thoughts?

Grazie.

I'd make sure the ability isn't excessively OP if certain units get them. Giving Eternal Warrior to the wielder sounds decent, until a doom of Malan'tai gets a hold of it.
Perhaps limited use items? Only one game of use?
Well, if you make it open to anyone, then you won't have the problem of useless upgrades for certain characters, imo.

You could try only being able to change a certain percentage of your points between battles, somewhat like the sideboard concept of Magic. Say between battles, you can change 20% of your army by points. That might lead to an interesting evolving arms race as players can't completely revamp their armies, but they can add new surprises.

Even though this is not for big armies like the usual game, you can try those kill-team rules (that fits for games between 200 and 300 points)

http://heralds-of-ruin.blogspot.co.uk/p/kill-team-rules.html

Each characters is played as an independant character (with some exceptions) and there is the notion of XP, level-up and custom gears for all your units.

Also, sweet choice of up-to-date codex/armies that GW doesn't care to support these days. (Like Genestealer Cults)

Do you know how IG orders would work with kill team?

The biggest problem for experience upgrades is that 40k is significantly less granular than most RPGs; in 40k, one point in one stat means a lot more than it would in something like Shadowrun, because the stats have fewer grades and are used for less. The best progression systems in campaigns I've seen are simply escalation systems where victories allow you access to more units/larger armies in subsequent games in the campaign.

I played a campaign that gave you an extra warlord trait for accomplishing certain bonus objectives. There were a few other things as well you could unlock, but the warlord trait one I liked.

It rules like this(or something very similar): You got a bonus warlord trait for accomplishing the bonus objective. The bonus traits were cumulative throughout the campaign.

You could take bonus traits on other HQ choices that would be able to take them if they were your warlord even if they were not. So if you had two main HQ choices, and one bonus trait, you could take one on each. Your actual warlord had to have at least 50% of the traits however. So if you had unlocked 2 bonuses, you actual warlord would either have all three, or 2 and your other HQ could have 1.

The traits were selected as normal per your HQ, so rolled at the beginning of the game unless they had another option (ie pick one from your codex). You could not have the same trait on one HQ twice, as they do not stack, but you could have the same one on two separate HQ choices. If you had an HQ with a set trait (such as the DA HQ having the hunt), the first trait to that HQ still had to be the set one, but subsequent ones could be rolled for.

All the traits had to be selected from the same table. It never came up, but if your HQ had enough bonuses to get one of each trait in the table, he could then chose another in a different table. So for example, if I ran a DA HQ as my warlord, and unlocked 6 bonus traits. On game seven, I could give that HQ every trait on the DA warlord table, then select one randomly from ones in the book

In our campaign, your actual warlord and two troop choices could not change between missions, and there were rules for changing other parts of your army, but that's separate from the bonus warlord trait, and can be done in your campaign however you choose.

Each player was given the bonus objective as a secret at the beginning of each game. You did not know your opponents secret bonus objective, and they did not know yours. It was quite possible to obtain your bonus objective even if you lost, and also possible for both players to get their bonus objectives.

We did like this bonus for a number of reasons. First was the fact that it did not require a model swap or change to a model to represent WYSIWYG. If I unlocked a free piece of war gear, how do I represent that combi-melta on my captain with a bolt pistol. Second, there were no points associated. You didn't have to worry about one character having an extra 200 points worth of options. Another was it being a bonus that was not army specific. Although you could argue some list can benefit more from some traits than others, all armies can use warlord traits, and they could equally benefit from the extra one (rolling them of course), instead of having an HQ unlock some bonus that would not apply to them, or a bonus that doesn't apply to your army (yay my gun line unlocked furious charge).

As for what the secret objective were, usually simple things like have more scoring units on the board than your opponent at the end of the game, launch more assault than your opponent (or launch x assaults), secure a table top objective that your opponent doesn't know about (ie, that ruin with no objective in it is your secret objective), have more units in no man's land/your deployment/or enemy deployment than your opponent (units on holding/contesting objectives don't count), have a unit on both side flanks of your opponent's deployment zone, kill the enemy warlord(although there were less killing ones as killing tended to lend more to primary objectives), and so on.

I'm sure there is a detail or two that I am missing, but it that was basically how it functioned. The idea was also universally well met by the players in the campaign.

You could try something like this, YMMV

Thanks to all of you! Special shout out goes to static cat- I love those kill team rules!

As well as pwntallica for your detailed response! I look forward to trying these out when I get to playing again (not till the summer, I am at school now). Even if I had space for the models there's no way I'd have time