The Cursed Problem of The Banner Saga Trilogy
So I was watching a presentation from GDC 2019 by designer Alex Jaffe about cursed problems in game design. To save you a watch (although I highly recommend you check it out sometime), he defines cursed problems as situations where you have two or more contradictory promises to players of the experience your game will provide.
Having recently finished up two playthroughs of The Banner Saga trilogy, I felt like this presentation gave me the words I was looking for to describe the dissonance I was experiencing between narrative and gameplay in the series.
On the one hand, the game promises a challenging tactical RPG where you’ll need to promote and equip items to your best heroes to wage into battle with confidence. On the other, it also promises a “game-of-thrones-style” experience where decisions in the world have unforeseen consequences and practically anyone could die from a narrative encounter.
Herein lies the problem with the series. In a playthrough, there’s only one resource to spend on promoting heroes, purchasing supplies for your caravan (if you run out, you’ll lose caravan members and have a lower morale), and obtaining items for your heroes. If you spend your Renown (the game’s currency) on an item for a higher level hero, you may not have Renown to level your heroes or purchase supplies. Sounds like a tough choice, right? Perfect for a brutal game about survival and hard decisions!
Except I never really felt like there was much to consider. The optimal path for the most part is to use Renown to level your core heroes. At least there’s player agency in which heroes you choose to level, offering you options to how you approach combat. Right? Well, sort of.
You may spend Renown leveling up a hero, even purchasing a nice item for them. So far so good. A few hours into the run you’re in a dialogue and you make a choice that suddenly brings that hero to an early death. You lose the renown. You lose the item. The story goes on.
You’re farther into the game so losing someone you’ve put so much into can really sting. There’s also not an obvious sign in each dialogue scene that you’re putting said person in danger. Sometimes there’s no mention of them and then you’re betrayed and they step in to take the killing blow in place of your leader.
What’s tricky here is that you can’t just do away with these dialogue scenes where a hero could die because you eliminate a core promise of the game which is navigating a dangerous world where anyone can be felled.
The game wants you to play through it multiple times with an emphasis on its branching paths and choices that matter. If you’re playing a game like this, you probably want to respect the chaos of the run and move forward with that death. If that death was of your favorite/strongest hero though, you’re more likely angry at the sudden weakness of your team than you are devastated at the loss of someone you’ve grown to care for.
Purging The Curse Without Killing The Game
So let’s define neatly what our conflicting promises to the player are:
A tactical RPG system where you can level up heroes to overcome challenging combat.
A world where your choices matter and can even lead to character death.
We need to reward the player for mastering the combat system and we need to respect the choices they make by providing sometimes fatal consequences that can affect anyone. As things stand these promises can seriously hamper the fun of the game by creating a death spiral where a dialogue choice kills your carry along with all the Renown you invested in them, then you lose in future combat leading to less Renown, and then your caravan is faced with more penalties until you reach a point where you are underpowered and cannot progress.
An Argument for Mastery through Experience
The roguelike/lite genre has blown up in recent years and I’ve personally enjoyed quite a few games in the genre. What’s wrong with having things go so poorly that a run is doomed and you just restart with more experience and knowledge of the game for a better second run?
In the Banner Saga, you can’t progress in the story past certain points if you can’t win the combat. You’re also denied the fun of higher level characters and how they handle because you were losing and could not afford to upgrade them. You can’t afford items so you might miss out on this subsystem of optimization for builds. You are simply missing out on playing the game. Compare this to Hades where dying is built into the narrative and you can unlock upgrades for future runs and you have one game where mastery is fun along the way and another where you are punished until you get things just right.
There’s also the problem that when you replay the game you are now driven to make dialogue choices that are optimal. If every choice in a given circumstance awarded equal Renown but different narrative beats, I could try a different one on each playthrough. Knowing that one will seriously hurt my party and another will reward me, I am put in a situation where I either get to experience a new story branch with a consequential path or make the same optimal choice each time so that I can afford to level my heroes and experience character progression.
Fun is consistently the sacrificed variable when these promises are at odds. So what’s there to be done? I have a few options in mind.
Solution 1: Recoup Your Losses
The first solution to come to mind is that when a hero dies, the item they were equipped with goes into your party inventory and any Renown you spent upgrading them returns to your party. You still have the setback of losing someone that may have facilitated your playstyle but there is the benefit of being able to try a new one out or level up a similar hero to replace them.
From a narrative perspective, you could justify it as their heroic sacrifice and the Renown that brings to your caravan. A legendary hero falls and while they will be missed, new ones are inspired to step up and take their place.
This design choice also respects the grittiness of the world because you lost them permanently and feel sadness for the connection you formed with them rather than the numbers they output in battle.
Solution 2: Greater Renown
This option seems easier at first but will need some work on the backend. If you simply tweak the numbers of how Renown is rewarded, the player has more to spend on their heroes and while a lost one still stings, it isn’t the death of a run.
The tradeoff here is that more Renown means more chances to purchase supplies for the Caravan which could lower the difficulty of caravan management to a point of no challenge which means no fun.
This means upping the cost of supplies to keep them scarce or giving less chances to obtain them in general like lowering the amount traders have.
The strength of this option is that you are able to level more heroes in a run and that you get to experience more of the game rather than hitting challenges you’re underleveled for and having to restart.
Solution 3: Differentiating Heroes & Key Caravan Members
In one of my recent playthroughs of the series, I really wanted to level Ludin and build him to have an almost guaranteed crit with crazy damage. At the end of the Banner Saga 2, I simply did not have him for end fights in the game. This is a frequent experience in the trilogy. A hero you’ve put a lot into is removed from the party for story reasons. Now you’re going into combat and your hands are tied behind your back.
Looking at the X-Com series, what if the units you were leveling to bring into combat were not the same as the key figures of your caravan? Losing a key figure becomes an emotional loss but you still have your go to warriors ready to fight.
This could even be expanded into new systems of caravan management. Ludin starts as an uptight prince that looks down on his subjects but comes to respect and learn from them. Instead of charging into battle, he could be a key figure that levels up (either naturally or with Renown spent) through the game that gives a passive buff to your warriors or caravan.
Choose to invest in Oddleif? Your archers have a 10% strength dodge boost. Invest in Ubin? Your caravan gains 25% more morale from a day of rest. If spending Renown or some other limited resource to level up the key figures and their passives, you could borrow from Solution 1 and have a way to recoup that resource if the key figure dies from a dialogue scene.
Another route would be a TellTale situation where you can choose from a limited number of key figures to respond to a given situation with the notion that it could be fatal. You could send someone you haven’t invested in and both feel the guilt of sending them to their death while not nerfing your capabilities in combat or exploration.
Wrap Up
I tried in as concise a manner possible to provide solutions that would not complicate the production or add a lot of work/fundamentally change the game. There may always be a conflict that threatens the player’s fun between the promises of meaningful choices and tactical combat but I believe these mitigate the worst frustrations I experienced in my playthroughs. I’d be curious to hear what you think of these solutions? Are there fatal flaws I’m missing in them? Do you have another solution to the cursed problem presented?