Any fictional
roleplaying game can be recognized as such, because it will have a title consisting of two alliterative plural nouns suggestive of its genre separated by an ampersand. A writer in need of a fictitious parallel to
Vampire: The Masquerade, for instance, would probably dub it something like "
Cloaks & Coffins". Bonus points if the two nouns are
a place name and a monster name.
The Magic Ampersand form serves the same instant-identification purpose for ad hoc roleplaying games that the
Chest Insignia does for ad hoc superheroes.
Of course, sometimes there is
Truth In Television:
Bunnies and Burrows,
Castles and Crusades,
Mutants and Masterminds,
Villains and Vigilantes,
Tunnels and Trolls... all paying homage to the mother of them all,
Dungeons And Dragons.
Compare
The Noun And The Noun.
Examples:
- Rona Jaffe's Mazes & Monsters.
- The first edition Dungeons & Dragons actually parodied itself, with an insert cartoon showing several fantasy characters playing a "mundane life" RPG titled Papers & Paychecks.
- "We're pretending we are workers and students in an industrialized and technological society."
- A fictional roleplaying game/laser tag hybrid called "Aliens & Asteroids" appeared in an episode of War of the Worlds
- Grottos and Gremlins from the video game Bully.
- Literary example: Neal Stephenson's The Big U explicitly compares the LARP Sewers and Serpents, played by characters in the novel, to Dungeons and Dragons.
- The Webcomic Darths & Droids.
- The real-life Tabletop Games Villains and Vigilantes, by Fantasy Games Unlimited. They also made Starships & Spacemen.
- Wizards & Warriors in DC Comics' Robin and, if this troper recalls correctly, an episode of Quantum Leap.
- Wizards & Warriors was also the name of a summer replacement TV series in the early 80s. It parodied many themes and tropes from fantasy stories and FRP games. One episode even featured the hero gathering a "Dungeons and Dragons"-style party of specialists to go on a quest.
- There's yet another Wizards & Warriors series out there...a trilogy of video games developed by Rareware for the NES.
- The webcomic Dungeon Damage had a group of Dragons playing "Humans and Houses".
- The (unnecessarily complex, at least for this first-edition AD&D veteran) Powers & Perils
fantasy role-playing game, published by Avalon Hill, if you can believe it.
- The superhero RPG Mutants And Masterminds.
- An episode of Dexters Laboratory, (Itself called D & DD) features the titular character running a game of "Monsters & Mazes". Dee-Dee replaces him as the Game Master, with amusing consequences.
- A sketch in The Onion Movie featured the game "Wizards & Warbeasts."
- In Spellcasting 101: Sorcerers Get All The Girls, a group of students at Sorcerer University is always playing "Malls & Muggers".
- From the web series, "Gold": "Goblins & Gold"
- The computer RPG Might & Magic
- Fox Trot had a series of strips where Jason and Marcus were playing "Houses & Humans", which is pretty much what it sounds like.
