Inside your gaming group, how do you people refer to your AW-powered campaigns? Do you say “tomorrow night we’re playing Dungeon World” or do you use some other title, derived from play or maybe chosen by the MC at the beginning?
In my experience, not all RPG campaigns grow a separate identity. People just play “Shadowrun” or even “Forgotten Realms”. I was wondering if this rebranding of sorts was more frequent in games that encourage worldbuilding and strong narrative.
Or maybe I’m just stating the obvious?
When I pitched to my current group, I said, “Well, I’m willing to run Apocalypse World, or Monster of the Week which uses the same engine.”
In general our campaigns don’t get names; if there happens to be a possibility of confusion, they end up being “Jesse’s D&D game” vs “Marc’s D&D game” or the like.
I think it might depend on how strong the initial worldbuilding concept was. I know that when we started an AW game by saying “I want to play in coal-mining Appalachia, like the opening/trailer for Hunger Games” it felt way more natural to refer to the game as Hunger World than if we’d just thrown together a melange of ideas and tried to make a name stick.
Is the question whether you name your campaign or just go by the RPG’s title?
For published campaigns, we’re usually using the product name (example: Savage Tide). For homebrew, we’re using the RPG name (example: Dungeon World).
This is not specifically related to AW-games.
Currently, we use a mix of “Legend of the Five Rings”, “Shadows of Jigoku” (main campaign name) and “when we play?”
Our campaigns are named, but we generally refer to the game by the system.
Marshall Miller I suppose what I mean is: does the game gain its own identity, beyond the rules system?
For example, our Monster of the Week game has very quickly been nicknamed Belle Chasse, from the town it’s set in. And that despite being very vanilla: hunters, threats, an Apocalypse looming, nothing else.
I think it’s very natural for games to take on the name of a dominant feature. Our main ApW games have been called “Allison’s Alley”, “The Luxor”, and “Windmills”, after the hardholder, the hardhold in an old Vegas casino, and the main feature of the landscape around the hardhold. Our Monsterhearts campain was just called “Monsterhearts”, Monster of the Week is called that or sometimes “Seb’s game”, and I don’t think the Dungeon World game has a name yet. Our Tunnels & Trolls game is currently often called “Goatquest!”, and the Prince Valiant game is called “the Prince Valiant game”.
So yeah, rules system as identifier, sure, but sometimes a game does take on it’s own name. I expect that Matt Strickling has a good point about names being more likely to stick when they are emergent rather than assigned.
Thanks everybody. I’m thinking Name Your Game could be a important step in a ruleset that emphasises worldbuilding. Or even a minigame inside the game. Hmm…
°Runs to his notepad°
I do a lot of PbF games. Often times, we break out each scene into its own thread and each scene gets something like a chapter name. It’s common to name PbF games, too, because there may be more than one virtual table of the same RPG running or there may be past games to be confused with.
A bit like con games then, I suppose,
I tend to assign a campaign name to keep blog posts, announcements, and files neatly sorted. Our AW game is officially called London Calling (as it’s in London and they live by the river), but we usually refer to the game in speech as Apocalypse World.