August 11, 2024: Naming Your Sessions?

Here's a weird question for the tabletop RPG folks: Does anyone else struggle with naming their sessions? If so, what do you do with them? For some campaigns – say, episodic space opera or super-hero fare – it feels thematic to introduce an adventure with a catchy title: "Tonight's adventure: The Tears of Destiny!" or the like. When I ran a Star Trek campaign decades ago, I even printed out title cards in an appropriate-looking font.

But a challenge I've found is that all knowledge is power for players. Thus, it's difficult to balance keeping titles evocative without giving too much away. Avoiding spoilers means that titles tend to feel a bit flavorless, at least for me: "The Incident" or "The Unseen Danger" work, but they're flat. Conversely, a title like "The Death of Dr. Destructo!" might make the players go, "Yeahhhh, before we leave the Justice Hombre headquarters, why don't we all suit up with our anti-Destructo armaments . . . just in case?"

I could tell folks after the adventure is over what the title was, but that feels anticlimactic. "Oh, that adventure was called 'Living the Dream' . . . I mean, obviously, what with you all having been trapped in a hellish dreamscape and all, forced to fight for your lives. Pretty clever, if I do say so myse- where are you going?!"

I'm probably overthinking it, but I've also held a grudge against Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones for decades because the clones don't do much attacking until the very end, and – when they do – it's a good thing they were attacking. It's like going to a movie called Invasion of the Body Snatchers and leaving the theater going, "Whew! Thank goodness those body snatchers invaded. Things were looking bleak for the heroes before they showed up!"