Super Mario Adventures

I’ve been playing both Super Mario Odyssey and Animal Crossing: New Horizons with my daughter recently, and they’ve given me TTRPG thoughts.

Every time I get a multi-moon in Odyssey, which follows every boss battle, and have to sit through the little celebratory photo-op cinematic, I think about railroaded D&D adventures. So many of WOTC’s 5e adventures (and many from earlier editions, from what I’ve heard) have a Super Mario structure. The players are walked through a plot from chapter to chapter, free to choose their course of action on a small scale, but always steered toward the next chapter. Of course it’s on the DM to figure out how and how-much to steer. It probably pushes a lot of inexperienced DMs to create RPG-horror-stories as they make un-fun choices to keep things on track.

Animal Crossing, on the other hand, provides many different incentives, but it’s up to the player to decide what they value and how they want to spend their time. (A few early options: upgrade your housing; get the museum built and populated with fossils and creatures; buy and enjoy clothes, hairstyles, or decor; design custom clothes; fill your Critterpedia with entries.) There’s basically (as far as I’ve seen) no conflict and very little in the way of factions or NPCs in the world who will do meaningful things the player might want to interact with, so the comparison with the type of TTRPG play I prefer doesn’t go very far—I don’t think I have much patience for cozy RPGs—but there is a lot a GM could learn from the open-endedness of ACNH gameplay. (The fact that your ACNH island is randomly/procedurally generated, like many TTRPG hex-maps—I’m thinking of ShadowDark and Mythic Bastionland’s generation procedures—is a fun similarity.)