Thoughts on Porting/Adapting/Fudging The Banner Saga to Tabletop

The Banner Saga, or Post-Apocalyptic Oregon Trail Viking Tactics DX as I like to call it, was the first video game I ever saw crowdfunded. Though I lacked the money to participate in or experience it until almost a decade after the trilogy started, it has lived in my head in some form or another ever since. I have certain gripes about the lack of interactivity with the ancestral banner that gives the series its namesake, and questions about the way some of the cumulative choices pan out across the series, but I enjoyed the moment-to-moment gameplay, story beats, and lavish artstyle throughout. Do recommend.

Often I wonder how I'd go about porting or adapting the game to a tabletop setting because for some reason I need the things I like to bleed into every other medium I like. But I never got around to trying before now because it feels like equal parts convoluted and "yeah, duh". But since I'm now the guy who spitballs Dragonlance x Talislanta mashups, it feels silly not to just go for it already.

Gameplay in TBS falls into three major categories that I will call combat, caravaning, and conversation.

Combat

Most of your time spent playing TBS is spent fighting or preparing to fight battles, in which individual characters take turns moving around a grid-based map and using abilities that reward planning and positioning. If you're familiar with the FinFan Tactics series or basically any Ogre Battle game besides The March of the Black Queen or Person of Lordly Calibur, you already know the basics.

Where TBS differs is the fact that every character has two separate "health" bars that have to be managed carefully, and a turn order system that encourages spreading the damage around, rather than defeating enemies one by one.

Because tactics video games and combat-heavy fantasy TTRPGs have so much shared DNA, I think that overall the TBS system can be ported to tabletop directly, with only minor adaptations to the turn and actions systems. The end result is something that feels quite different from combat systems where you roll dice for everything, but I think that's somewhat refreshing.

Stats

Every character in TBS, regardless of class, has the same stats in common. These are Strength, Armor, Willpower, Exertion, Break, Movement Range, and Attack Range:

• Strength (STR) is both attack power and health; you deal as much damage with attacks as you have STR, and once you reach 0 STR you're defeated.
• Armor (ARM) is a pool of damage reduction that decreases direct STR damage you suffer before being depleted. A 3 STR attack against someone with 2 ARM will remove the ARM first and only deal 1 STR damage.
• Willpower (WIL) is a pool of points you can spend on actions to improve them. 1 WIL = 1 extra tile of movement, 1 more point of STR or ARM damage, an enhanced version of an ability, etc.
• Exertion (EXE) is how many Willpower points you can dump into a given action. 2 EXE means you can spend up to 2 WIL on something at a time, etc.
• Break (BRK) is bonus damage that is always applied to attacks vs ARM, regardless of current STR level. 1 BRK means your attacks always deal 1 extra damage against enemy ARM.
• Movement Range is how many tiles you can move in a turn. Diagonal movement costs 2.
• Attack Range is how many tiles away you can attack from. 1 is most melee units, 2 is some spearmen and others with long reach, and 3 or more is most ranged units.

In addition, most characters have 0-1 Passive Abilities and 1-3 Active Abilities, depending on class and level.

Size is also a factor that comes into play, although I wouldn't call it a stat like the others. Size is usually either 1x1 tile for humans, or 2x2 tiles for big beefy Varl boys, with less common creatures taking up different configurations of space.

This facet of the game is very easy to port to tabletop. Most PCs and monsters should have pretty small, manageable stat blocks if you choose to stick with the level of individual mechanical complexity offered by in-game classes. A character could have something like this for most of their career:

Sindri Unnsbur, Human Spearman

STR 8, ARM 6, WIL 5, EXE 1, BRK 1

Move 5, Range 2, Size 1x1

Passive: Embolden - Each kill the Spearman makes encourages allies to fight harder, granting 1 Willpower to the Spearman and any adjacent allies.

Active: Impale - Skewer an adjacent enemy unit, doing normal Strength damage (100% chance to hit) before knocking it back. Impaled characters Bleed for 1 round, taking 1 Strength damage for each tile moved.

And that's it.

Talents

Alright it turns out I was lying when I said "and that's it" for character stats in this game. That's because in my first draft of this post I entirely forgot that Talents exist, and only got remound of them when I thought I was 90% done because I just so happened to scroll past a hyperlink to them on the wiki. (This is because I'm not only a bad writer but also a bad researcher.)

Introduced in the second entry in the series, Talents are secondary progression given as a reward after maxing out your stats. There are 2 Talents per Stat, but you can only select 1 to put any points in for each. That makes 10 Talents, each with 6 ranks that improve their passive benefits by some percentile value, usually +5/10% per rank. You buy the first 3 ranks with promotion points, and can find rare items that give a bonus of +1 to +3 to them in your travels.

Talents let you specialize your characters a little more, making them better at the existing combat systems without radically changing them:

• Hunker Down (ARM) grants a 20% chance to resist 1-6 ARM damage per hit.
• Tighten Straps (ARM) grants a 20-45% chance to regenerate 1 ARM per turn.
• Robust (STR) grants a 20% chance to resist 1-6 STR damage per hit.
• Artery Strike (STR) grants 10-35% added Critical Hit chance. (Double all STR damage, including WP expended on the attack. AoE attacks and attacks from passive traits can crit.)
• Defy (WP) grants a 30-80% chance to straight up ignore a killing blow but be reduced to 1 STR.
• Stubborn (WP) grants a 20% chance to regenerate 1-6 WP per turn.
• Dodge (EXE) grants a 5-30% chance to avoid STR attacks completely.
• Lucky Shot (EXE) grants 30-80% added hit chance.
• Exploit (BRK) grants a 10-35% chance to gain Puncture on an attack. (+1 STR damage per 2 ARM the target has lost that fight.)
• Divert (BRK) grants a 5-30% chance to entirely avoid an ARM attack.

The power creep provided by these Talents is mostly taken into account in the balancing of TBS, so even if your entire party hangs out unkillable at death's door with 1 STR for 80% of the battle, the battle layouts and AI are meant to remain challenging.

But porting TBS to tabletop messes with many of those finely balanced systems at least a little bit, which means that Talents could get extremely wonky late in the game. More Playtesting Is Needed to determine if you should fiddle with the values for some Talents, or just remove them entirely in favor of slightly deeper Class customization.

Class

Speaking of classes, those are the main way characters are differentiated from one another in TBS. They affect their starting stats, max stats, and abilities, and at a certain rank level (out of a max of 15) they can be promoted to one of two advanced class choices that grant them extra abilities. It's another extremely Tactics-esque part of the game, but not nearly as complex as most full-fledged examples of that genre.

There are several dozen classes in TBS, many of them unique to specific characters or party members, and many more available to NPCs only. You could port all of them directly over to tabletop without a hitch as long as you've sorted out combat (see below), but I think that would start to make combat very same'y-feeling when it's no longer just one person controlling the whole party, but a bunch of players in control of individual characters who can only use the same few moves over and over, and common enemy types become easy to identify and boring to deal with.

That's why I propose making classes slightly more complex.

At the very least, give players a few more abilities in their toolkit, and give them some freedom of choice in the matter. If you keep the trilogy's level cap of 15, consider giving them a choice between 2 new abilities every few ranks rather than just once, until they have 4 or 5 active abilities and may 2 passives by the end of their career. Lowering the level cap to something nice and even like 10 would correspondingly give you fewer abilities to pick or for the GM to design.

For example, give that spearman above the passive ability later on to reposition after using Impale, or maybe allow them to pick up a single ability from a different martial class to reflect them dabbling in other fighting styles to diversify their options.

Species

I want to include a little subsection here for something that is mechanically present in TBS, but never explicit: character species. You can never create a character in the computer game, so you're never faced with a screen explaining the unique traits each group of humanoid peoples in the game world possess. But they do influence how you use the units in battle.

(Minor spoilers for the types of playable characters available in TBS 3, if you want to skip ahead. I really wish Blogger had clickable spoiler tags as a built-in tool so I didn't have to try to parse through the solid wall of text that it spits everything into in the HTML view.)

Humans are bog-standard with the most variety of classes, unsurprisingly. Varl always occupy 4 squares because of their size. Dredge usually have a passive "Shatter" trait where dealing ARM damage to them causes a chain reaction that damages nearby Dredge allies. Horseborn have the speed and size of a horse, often moving farther than other characters and taking up 2x1 squares like Large (Long) creatures from the original print of D&D 3E. Etc.

If you decide that species is baked into class, you don't have to concern yourself with the details. But if you want to allow for character creation and customization where species and class are separate choices, it's worth keeping in mind the traits you would or wouldn't want to emphasize in your game.

For example, I'd be likely to drop the negative passive trait Dredge have because it mostly exists to add a layer of tactical satisfaction when you're fighting Dredge enemies in the video game, and it would feel kind of pointed and targeted if a Dredge PC was saddled with that all campaign; they'd already be dealing with enough extra trouble, by my reckoning.

Character Creation

I've kind of been beating around the bush on this one for a few sections, haven't I?

Character creation isn't a thing in TBS, which is completely normal for the genre. But outside of introducing somebody to a new game, just handing a premade character to a player doesn't quite light the spark, in my entirely unqualified opinion. TTRPG characters thrive more on either randomization or player customization, or a bit of both.

So if everyone at the table is creating a custom character, either give them a set number of bonus points to distribute amongst their stats (excluding Movement Range and Attack Range), or have everyone roll a small die like d4 or d6 and distribute that many points, with a max of +2 to any single stat so balance doesn't go completely out the window.

Then, either roll on your favorite random table or come up with a background for each character to finish them off. Maybe provide them with an appropriate item for it. A veteran huscarl might start with a scarred shield they used when defending their jarl from an assassination attempt, and that shield might fill the "armor" slot and provide some small passive bonus. More on items down below.

Titles

Heroic Titles are unique upgrades granted to each character after they reach rank 11, introduced in TBS 3. They buff the character with the title in some way, and they have their own renown tracks that improve them over time just like ranking up in one's class. Only 1 character can hold a given title, so in TBS it was important to match characters with titles that complemented one another, even if they might not have made the most thematic sense.

But in tabletop where each player has more agency, I think titles should instead be tied to how a given character has been played over the course of a campaign. It doesn't make much sense for the chunky varl bulwark to pick up Shadow Walker after a campaign spent being big, up-front, and imposing for example.

Personally I believe a player should have input on what title their character gets, or in creating a new title alongside the GM that would be appropriate for them. But you could also run the game so that the consequences of the characters' actions and their fame or infamy in the game world dictate what title they are known by, as an organic response to player choice. In either case there is more room for narrative consideration here that would be a shame to ignore in favor of pure min-maxing.

Items

TBS dispenses with armor and weapon slots or other traditional loadouts. Everybody can equip a max of 1 item at a time that provides some kind of passive benefit, often gated by character rank. The characters are otherwise assumed to always have all the necessities of their class; archers always have their bows, shield-bangers their shields, etc. 

That kind of abstracted, 'don't worry about it' inventory works well for what is shaping up to be a relatively rules-lite tabletop system, but at the same time there is room to expand to add customizability. Maybe increase the number of item slots to 3 or 4, with categories like arms, armor, and trinkets or accessories. Existing items from TBS can be slotted into the above, mostly as trinkets, and a few weapons and clothing can be added to round things out wherever the GM finds there's a lack of support.

... Oh hey, this chapter was supposed to be about actual combat, wasn't it?

Turn Order

Battles in TBS have a somewhat unique tempo. Where other games might use a speed stat or some other initiative system to determine turn order, TBS just uses your assigned party order. But every other turn in between your party members is the enemy's, at least until the end of combat phase called Pillage.

This creates a fast-paced back-and-forth between the player and the computer that intensifies rather than winds down the more units on one side drop; the last two remaining units on one team are suddenly much more mobile and active than they were in the first round of combat because now they have their fallen allies' turn slots, and if you didn't take precautions to weaken them beforehand, they're in a position to tip the scales the other way. I've never played it to be sure, but it kinda looks like chess from the outside.

Once the second-to-last unit on one team drops, Pillage mode activates, and all the units in the numerically superior team go in order before the lone survivor gets their single turn, making mop-up faster and easier and preventing really drawn-out and annoying last stands by either side.

The system is great for automated gameplay, but making the table keep track of two separate but threaded-together initiative cycles that will change in size over the course of combat without some kind of VTT aid feels like it could be a bit much.

That's why I offer (but don't necessarily recommend) some alternatives:

1. Add a speed or initiative stat. The character sheet for this 'game' won't be very cluttered, so one more box isn't a big deal. That value is your set position in combat order with no dueling rotations, meaning allies or enemies can come immediately before or after you, depending. This makes combat much more traditional.
2. Use group initiative. Everybody on one side goes at once, with attacks and effects resolving in the order that the party has put itself in, in order to empower players to coordinate and find a way to make the person who goes last just as valuable as the one who goes first. Maybe the whole party can spend WP up to their lowest EXE value to add a bonus to this roll.

Bear in mind that both of the above would render Pillage mode unnecessary, as well as change the metagame somewhat by removing the biggest incentive for the practice of wounding a bunch of units but keeping them alive until the very end so they don't give their turn slots to healthier allies.

Action Economy

TBS lets you move, then take a single action. Actions include STR attack, ARM attack, and using abilities, among certain other context cues. You can also Rest at the start of your turn before moving, avoiding doing anything to regain 1 WIL.

I see no reason to mess with this simplicity, except to suggest that you let characters move before or after acting. It just seems reasonable.

No Rolls Necessary*

There's basically no random chance or uncertainty involved in any actions in combat. Only a handful of abilities have randomized outcomes, like which nearby tiles get affected by certain AoE attacks, and those could easily be simulated by stealing the rules for when ranged attacks or thrown weapons go awry from your preferred ruleset, or circumvented entirely by just giving control to the caster.

Attack rolls aren't a thing either, outside of the very specific situation where a unit tries to deal health damage to another unit whose Armor is higher than the attacker's Strength. In that case every point of ARM above the attacker's STR confers a -10% miss chance (up to a maximum -80% to hit), easily resolved with a d10 roll or the like.

Overall this is the easiest piece to port to tabletop, to the point that it almost feels too simple. It's not a dumbing-down of combat, though- it just gives more room for other parts of combat to be more tactical, and lets all sides operate and strategize with a sense of confidence uncommon to tabletop, I feel.

Renown

Every enemy you deep six in TBS grants the character who dealt the killing blow 1 point of Renown toward increasing their Rank. It's essentially just combat XP and Level, but here all that matters is who deals the final point of Strength damage. In the video games this meant you have to carefully manage who struck the final blows how often, or else you could wind up with a handful of over-leveled kill-stealers and a bunch of massively under-leveled support characters.

That would be pretty annoying and cumbersome to coordinate with a whole party of live players, and unwittingly kill-stealing could disrupt the fun and maybe even cause some bleed-over, so it's best to drop that part of the mechanic for tabletop. Renown from combat encounters should be divided evenly, with unique rewards reserved for roleplaying, feats of exploration, out-of-the-box thinking, etc. and so on.

If you keep the upgrade track for characters' Heroic Titles, consider granting them 1 title Renown every time they act in accordance with that title.

Caravaning

The second biggest part of TBS (albeit a distant second as I look upon that wall of text up there) is the journey, heavily inspired by Oregon Trail and other lightly simulationist strategy games aimed at getting somewhere and managing your collection of rugged and/or hopelessly in-over-their-heads immigrants so you don't all die before you reach your destination.

I might've missed it in my playthrough a few years ago, but surprisingly I don't think TBS had any dysentery jokes.

Stats

Just like a party member, your whole caravan has stats that fluctuate during your adventure:

• Morale is the measure of your caravan's overall, well, morale. It represents your army and clansmen's mood and approval of your leadership, and it goes down from the drudgery of travel, up from resting, and up or down depending on your responses to special events. Morale gives you a willpower bonus or penalty in battle.
• Supplies are an abstract counter representing all the food, tools, weapons, and other resources your caravan burns through as it travels. Supplies are consumed each day of travel and every rest the caravan takes.
• Population is how many poor sods are following your banner at the moment. In-game they are divided up between clansmen, fighters, and varl. Fighters and varl contribute to mass combat encounters, while clansmen are the ordinary noncombatants caught up on all this mess and aren't often used directly as a resource by the game.

Let's break these down a little more separately than character stats before.

Morale

Morale reminds me of the sliding hope vs despair meters used in some LotR-inspired games, and it also mechanically incentivizes players to care about the caravan because their own self-interest and wellbeing are tied up in it.* Its 5-step scale can be kept as-is for tabletop, and whatever formulae are used to calculate it behind the scenes can be boiled down to moving ±1 along the track from major story beats.

• Poor Morale gives each character -2 WIL
• Weak gives -1 WIL
• Normal has no effect
• Good gives +1 WIL
• Great gives +2 WIL

Remember to take advantage of morale as a nonmechanical tool, too. At the end of the day it's not just a bonus or penalty to a combat stat, but a representation of the whole caravan's mood and wellbeing. Let it factor into roleplaying and the way the characters relate to the rest of the caravan in ways that couldn't be done outside of a TTRPG.

If morale is low, maybe the referee should consider the next random encounter to be an inciting incident for an argument between families, factions, or a challenge to existing leadership positions; if it's high, maybe an unexpected good outcome to an otherwise bad encounter would be merited as everyone pulls together and comes through. Use it to humanize the caravan into more than just a faceless mass waiting to die of dysentery.

Morale is a good mechanic overall, and fairly simple to adapt to tabletop. The other two, on the other hand...

Supplies & Population

The interaction between Supplies and Population greatly benefits from being automated by the game. Dividing the former by the latter with different weight multipliers added to each of the three types of caravan followers to get your running counter of remaining days worth of supplies would be a serious drag on a tabletop game, as well as very out-of-place in a ruleset that otherwise doesn't have much math.

So I instead propose going with a non-simulationist mechanic, like for example depletion dice.

Every unit of time of travel (whether it be days like in TBS, or something longer like weeks) and every extended rest to heal up or improve morale is a roll on the Supplies die, and a result of 1 reduces its size by 1 step. From a max size of say d8 or d10 it can dwindle down to a measly d4, and perhaps even further to a d2 coinflip before food runs out and people start deserting from your caravan or worse. Conversely, successfully leading a foraging party or finding a hidden trove of resources increases the die size by 1 step in turn.

Similarly, Population has a die that increases as new people join the caravan and decreases as they settle down, desert, or die in large numbers. An increase in the Population die may call for a Supplies check to see if it drops in size or not. Population doesn't require daily checks like Supplies do, being reserved for bigger events like helping to resettle a village or fighting in a War (more on that below).

The basic idea to stick to is you only need to worry about big, discrete events so you don't have to stop the game to factor in a lot of little minutia, like how many hours of passive berry picking the characters did and whether it matters or not.

Events

The meat of caravaning gameplay is dealing with the events that pop up along the way to your destination, either predetermined by the plot and your previous choices in events, or randomly drawn from a table of possible events with different triggers. Events typically have two or more branching choices to make, with the outcome being anything from an increase or decrease in Supplies or Population, to entering battle or finding items, to even losing party members if your luck is bad enough.

Like random backgrounds or optional initiative systems above, events can be largely taken from existing materials in the form of random encounter tables from your favorite supplement. You can also trawl the TBS trilogy itself and repurpose its events in tabletop form, making them more open-ended prompts without set dialogue branches to fit the new medium.

War

War is a special kind of event where your caravan encounters a large, hostile force. It is a large-scale battle between two opposing armies that you dictate the overall strategy for, which in turn determines how difficult a battle your party has to fight, which determines the final outcome of the war. In TBS there are 5 options for how to approach a war:

1. Charge! - The most aggressive battle plan that is, ironically, also the safest for your caravan. The party charges into the fray and fights off the main force, facing a tougher than average battle while caravan casualties remain low.
2. Formations! - A balanced battle plan with an easier fight for the player but heavier casualties for the caravan.
3. Hold them off! - A very easy battle for the player but pretty considerable casualties for the caravan.
4. Retreat! - No battle for the player whatsoever and some really severe casualties for the caravan.
5. Oversee! - No battle, but with an outcome that varies according to several factors like caravan strength, party strength, and any specific follow-up commands given. It's kind of like the Auto-Resolve button in the Total War series, and casualties are often close to equal to Formations! on average, at least according to the wiki.

In all of the options leading to a player battle, you have the option to stick around longer and fight multiple back-to-back fights as you draw the enemy's best away from your army as reinforcements to the current battle. You don't get to reposition or heal in between fights, but you earn increased rewards and renown, and your caravan suffers less for it.

Combat can be resolved as normal, while you can probably have the party come up with more nuanced commands than the above based on where and why a battle is being fought. Let them find creative uses for topography or feints, or anything else theater-of-the-mind'y.

At the conclusion of a War (which you might just want to rename "Mass Combat" or "Skirmish" or something because describing a single battle as a "war" feels a tiny bit silly to me even if it is etymologically justified within certain Germanic languages the mythologies of which the game takes a lot of its inspiration from) you roll your caravan's Population die a number of times determined by the referee, probably based on how nasty the enemy army is. The players can reduce the number of forced rolls and therefore make it less likely for the Population to deplete by fighting multiple battles in a row, and by giving smart orders on a macro level. Morale level may also play a role in this.

If by some disaster the Population die drops from d2 to 0, it isn't necessarily a game over. Several chapters of TBS revolve around just a few lonesome characters, lost or otherwise bereft of their larger group, and that can offer a completely different flavor of game for a time.

The Banner

It's in the title, it's on every piece of cover art, you almost always see it flapping in the bitter breeze above your caravan. It has embroidered upon it the name of everyone who has ever lived and died in the clan, their deeds and struggles, and it will continue to grow until the end of the world. The banner is a central piece of the visual language and aesthetic of the series, but aside from a few scenes where someone is mending or adding to the end of the banner, or passing it down to their successor, the banner doesn't actually factor into the story much, and basically isn't present in the gameplay at all.

I feel like that's a missed opportunity for the series, but one you can rectify and take full advantage of in a tabletop setting.

First off, emphasize how important it is in-universe. It is a symbol of leadership in many ways, always being carried by the de facto leader(s) of the caravan, exchanging hands and passing from one generation to the next at various points as the plot demands. It's not a formal symbol of the chieftain, but an implicit recognition of an individual's guidance by the whole community. We don't see it happen in the video games, but losing or allowing the banner to be damaged could be a cultural faux pas so great that it's the grounds for removing someone from leadership; "if you can't keep our past safe, how can we trust you with our future?" and the like.

Second, think of ways to gamify that value. Maybe capturing the banner is an explicit goal of the enemy in many Wars that could cripple the caravan's morale until it's taken back. Maybe risking its safety to carry it aloft can have the opposite effect in a high-stakes event. Maybe the party can't cash in their renown to rank up or acquire heroic titles until the caravan has had time to rest in safety, long enough for the weavers to add this latest chapter of the community's story to the banner and cement their trials and achievements in cultural memory. You could make a whole event out of the subtleties of language and imagery that go into each weaving, and use several of those to bookend major arcs of the table's journey.

Conversation

Just roleplay, duh.

But seriously, the depth, tempo, and tone of storytelling and decision-making is entirely up to you and the table. It's both the easiest and the most challenging thing to port over because you can no longer rely upon the series' pretty solid writing, but that's okay; this whole exercise has been to give you the tools to tell your own Saga with, not to follow in the footsteps of Rook, Alette, Iver and co.

I hope this was a readable and enjoyable deep-dive, and that you can create something beautiful from these messy building blocks.

Assuming I don't cannibalize this to create my own FKR game like I have half a mind to now that I've read this whole post over, of course.

* I don't know why I give hypothetical players so little credit in my writing. My assumption that many of them will need to have a subsystem reminding them to care about the meeples is unfair upon further reflection, and also kinda stupid considering how many stories there are of parties latching onto the tiniest throwaway NPC the referee had no plans for. But I'll keep that part in for the edge cases.