Better Gaming Through Animal Crossing: New Horizons

Be a better game master by copying what makes Animal Crossing so great!

Image via NPR.org

I feel like during a global crisis (or even a personal crisis) there’s a level of what I’m going to deem “necessary escapism” - Basically, a way for your brain to jump through the trap door of distraction. Lo and behold, I and many others have found their escape hatch in the candy-colored and squeak-filled world of Animal Crossing: New Horizons.

Right now my town - haphazardly named Meowsburg as I was too excited to be clever - has been invaded by a very charming camel who wishes to sell me rugs, and the two tanuki children who run one of the two stores on my island just upgraded, and honestly, I can’t imagine a better place to spend several hundred hours.

So, where am I going with this? Did I really just bug Jay, Michael, and Jameson until they let me write about the game I’m obsessed with? Yes, obviously! But no. It’s because Meowsburg or any town in Animal Crossing: New Horizons is also a perfect model of how to make memorable cities in your own games!

In several Dungeon Master’s Guides - or any game with a section devoted to running the game, in all honesty - there are sections about townships and villages and cities. Runesmith, my YouTube crush of choice, did an amazing video on it:

Basically: Name, What Matters, Look. And that’s great advice. Seriously, 10/10, good place to start, thank you for not just shrugging at me. However, you’ll find out as soon as someone asks you what the Shopkeeper’s name and you pull a blank “Uuuhhh” that this advice will only take you so far.

So, what can we take from Animal Crossing?

Fill Your Town With Flat Villagers

Time for a hard truth about your beloved neighbor Hammie. Hammie… Is just the Jock Personality slapped on a talking hamster. He’s flat, as are all your neighbors in Animal Crossing. The personalities are so flat, in fact, that the Animal Crossing Wiki went ahead and cataloged all ten of them. So why do people - and certainly not me - get so attached to these villagers? Why do they buy them fancy clothes and hats and talk to them every day and draw fan art of themselves and Hammie playing beach volleyball? Simple - When something Dynamic meets something Flat, it bounces, and that’s a good thing.

In which I relate too hard to Bob.

Dynamic characters - your Player Characters, ideally - are characters that have motivations, wants, needs and change from Point A to Point B. Most movie characters are Dynamic, as are real people by default. Static characters, however, don’t really change or want to change. I could get really “used to teach writing” with this whole exercise, but I’ll spare you and get to the point: If you build a town and apply a simple, but recognizable, personality type to the NPCs within it, then it’ll not only feel more alive but have your characters coming back to it. The Lumberjack becomes The Bashful Lumberjack. The Shopkeep becomes the Haughty Shopkeep. Suddenly your players have something to bounce off of. Great, right? You don’t even need to get super in-depth with it. Write down some personality types on a chart and roll it when introducing a minor character!

The Animal Crossing Town Formula Works

You might feel obligated to make every stop on your PC’s grand adventure a place full of history and depth. Don’t. Sometimes, your players just need a place to rest and you just need a place to get this side-plot involving the new Griffin miniature you bought up and running.

The best way to get your town going is also the way the formula for how the game starts you off: Name + Two Shops and an Inn + Reason We’re Here + Three-to-Five Named NPCs = Town.

Note that this formula is horribly inaccurate for real-life settings… Then again, I used to live in the deep South, so maybe I’m onto something.

First, pick a name for your town. Please be a bit more creative than me but honestly, no one cares if you call it Plant + Ville. Then, put in two shops - One should be one your characters could play around in, like a haberdashery or something silly and the other one should let the players get stuff they need. Note how I said need and not want. Next, why are they stopping here? Finally, throw together some people who matter. Boom. You have a town.

Let’s try it out: Our town will be called Rosemary. It features a florist, a general store, and an Inn. We’re here to meet our Halfling Rogue’s ex-wife. The town includes the boisterous mayor known as Grendel, the shy medic Snake, and the grumpy innkeeper Barnabus. There: We now have a fully realized town that you can plop into your map that won’t feel like a ghost town.

Give Them Distractions

Ever use a laser pointer on a cat? Well, bad news buddy: Fishing in video games is the laser pointer and you’re the catnip addled ball of fuzz that’ll waste however many hours trying to catch The Perfect Fish. This is not a bad thing.

When running tabletop games in general, you have to be comfortable with the idea that players will inevitably “waste time.” Aabria Iyengar famously had an episode of he show on Saving Throw Show Pirates of Saltbay that was literally her players goofing off at a hot spring talking about their feelings. Note: It was freaking magical. Your players like the little weird moments that they create, so why not nurture that by making - and I’m totally going to copyright this - Microquests?

Have a person in town who collects rare bugs and see if they’ll go on a hunt for them. Give them an opportunity to craft clothes and accessories that have no mechanical benefit but are entirely theirs! You have lots of options to let your players decompress which can be great in more intense or long-running campaigns.

Image via GamingBolt

For over twenty years Animal Crossing has encouraged players to take it slow and just enjoy it at their own pace, and for almost fifty years we’ve had games about adventure and conquest. By finding a happy medium you can make the heights of your games feel truly epic, and make the parts of the game you would have once skipped absolutely memorable.