Success!
Unexpected, actually: Game Night at Its Your Move is fun and spirited, but casual drop-in people are not likely to play-test a d20 role-playing game. Which is related to why I am hashing out this radically simplified rule-set: I believe the rules in virtually all current d20 games are far too elaborate and off-putting. Like other RPG players I like commitment, but I would rather that the GM and players commit to the story, and the biographies of their characters, and not to a massively-elaborated rule-set.
John, Mike, Allie, and Ryan could not make it, and Christian had to leave early (much to his chagrin).
So it was left to Hans to play two characters and test how an encounter would work. He chose between 4 characters, which I had pre-generated that afternoon (15 minutes each). His two characters ended up fighting 3 fully-armored soldiers. In 7 rounds, Hans’s guys killed one foe and forced the other two to surrender, by using Fireball and a series of Evocation spells as well as good ol’ whack ’em. The fight went many rounds because foes and allies were pretty well-armored, and had trouble hitting each other; and they kept moving around both for combat advantage and for defense when injured. The fight took about 30 minutes (maybe less) to enact. Neither of us had to refer to a book once.
The relative simplicity of the combat-rules allowed something more interesting to develop quickly: Hans’s characters were trying to figure out who had destroyed their ship, sacked their home city, and even sacked the family farmstead of his lead character. The soldiers he defeated were invading Barzanians (from the city of Barza) who were looting his uncle’s farmstead. Once defeated, he bound up the two surviving foes and started asking questions. Meanwhile, refugees from the sack of Tuntaar were streaming through the woods, and started asking for refuge in the farmhouse. He found his surviving cousins (uncle was dead, and aunt died shortly after the fight). So by the end of the session, his main character not only had three boys (his cousins) to take care of, but he was amassing a potential fighting-force of Tuntaari refugees.
The plot thickened quickly, and not in the way I expected as GM! The way it unfolded was largely due to Hans’ questions and choices. That can be a little hair-raising as a GM, but I hope that I have tackled the main obstacles that this style of role-play can have. NPC and complex character generation is very fast; players can level-up their characters, I suspect, in about 10 minutes. So the focus can remain on the unfolding story, on collaborative story-creation.
Based on this test, I did revise my working Handbook. Many of the revisions are refinements of the text, to clarify and simplify explanations. I adjusted the two-rule method of determining the number and Rank of spells a caster can use, to limit a little more.