This incredible hobby has a deplorable curse of being called a Tabletop Role-Playing game or even worse, a TTRPG. To anyone outside looking in, this means nothing.
My gripe is that when I tell people I play Tabletop Role-Playing games I almost always have to follow up with "They are games like D&D". The fact that the name is not intuitive defeats the purpose of giving it that name. The goal of genre names of hobbies should be to explain a surface level understanding of what is being done so that an inquirer can make a more educated decision before pursuing the hobby. So I propose a rebranding of the name of our hobby to "TTA: Tabletop Adventure".
This name is superior since the word "adventure" is the primary differentiator rather than "role playing game". When I play a game of Pandemic, I am still playing a role of a character in a tabletop setting with the end goal of beating the game. When playing Into the Odd, my goal is to interact with a simulated world that reacts to my existence. This dynamic between the players and the world is what separates the genre's gameplay loop from other tabletop experiences.
The goal of the gameplay loop is for the players' actions to cause an ecosystem to react. In turn, the players have to adapt in order to pursue their goals, further causing the ecosystem to produce more encounters and events that ultimately lead to an adventure.
The players may be desperate for gold to pay off a loan and take a random job that turns out to be from a disguised dragon needing help retrieving his stolen hoard. When the players find the large hoard of gold, bring it back to town and pay the taxes for the treasure, it causes the local baron to have so much wealth he tries to invade a neighboring territory causing a war that affects commerce. This possible experience is what the name Tabletop Adventure is trying to convey to the uninitiated.
When using the word adventure, a relation to mainstream titles like: Lord of the Rings, Pirates of the Caribbean, or Indiana Jones forms. All of which set expectations as to what the game play achieves. Everyone can imagine cautiously navigating an ancient forest possessed by an untamed magic to find a lost treasure on the other side and understand what the gameplay is like without needing to know the rules. The context also gives the added bonus of some degree of separation from D&D which is beneficial when explaining games like Troika, Cairn, Mork Borg, or Mothership.
The name of a genre is a window that allows outsiders to peer in and get a surface level understanding of what is happening inside. With the window changing from Tabletop Role-Playing Games to Tabletop Adventures, I think the window not only becomes cleaner, but also larger to let more people discover this beautiful hobby. To discover new ways to express themselves and find their community, which is the something I would like to share with the world.
