Who's On Your Wing?
I've been playing a lot of Ace Combat 8 recently. A lot as in I've been through the campaign four times now, it's that good. One of the reasons I like it so much is that it does one of the things I liked about Ace Combat 7. Revealing the specifics here could be considered a minor spoiler for AC8 (though coming from AC7 I expected it) so I'm putting this break here in case anyone wants to avoid it (I'm also going to be giving minor spoilers for AC7 but that came out in 2019 so hopefully not as big a deal).
So the thing I like about AC7 (among many other things, it's a good game) is that over the course of the campaign the tail emblem on your planes evolves. It starts a couple of missions in, when everyone thinks you did Big Crime so you get these three while lines on the tail of whatever plane you're flying. But the important thing is that other characters react to this - as you fly more missions and turn the tide of the war,1 they start calling the player character "Three Strikes" in reference to the lines. And not just your allies! You repeatedly pick up enemy radio chatter referring to you as "Three Strikes" because they don't know your actual callsign ("Trigger")2 Later in the campaign, as Trigger is redeemed/exonerated from his Big Crime, the three lines are painted over as claw marks3. And a similar thing happens in AC8: while your actual callsign is "Rex" everyone calls you "The Wings of Theve" (or "Featherhead" from the enemies, again based on the wing emblem on your tail). And as the campaign goes on your tail emblem gets painted over and that leads to allies/enemies calling you a secret third/fourth thing that I don't want to spoil.
The feeling that the player gets (well, I do, I can see people bouncing hard off of Ace Combat's gassing-up of the player) is that you actually have a reputation. People have heard of you, they've been talking about you. They don't know your actual name so they've given you one4, and that's something I think your D&D-em-up campaigns need to include.
Given that your D&D-type PCs are going to be adventuring around and at the very least those that survive are going to be spending copious amounts of gold and probably telling their own tall tales in taverns, word's going to get around about them. People are going to hear about the PCs and give them epithets that those same PCs are eventually going to hear. This should make the world feel like it's naturally acknowledging and reacting to the PCs' deeds - people repeating those tales to others and word about the PCs is spreading. And maybe people get things a little wrong, maybe one or several PCs get epithets that don't quite reflect the truth. Are they going to try and correct that? How? There's adventure there! That loop of PCs acting and the world reacting is what good long-term campaigns are made of.
Ace Combat is a very fun series if you're willing to inhabit the fantasy of being the best fighter pilot because your body is immune to g-forces.↩
This also happens in the older AC games - "Moebius squadron" in AC4 is referred to as "ribbon squadron", "wardog squadron" in AC5 becomes "the Razgriz", etc.↩
I guess the maintenance crew do this - that's what happens in AC8 - but I always assumed it was Trigger himself who wanted the cool claw marks on his plane.↩
Here's as good a place as any to mention there's a vaguely similar thing in Armored Core 6. I've had a post on the backburner for years about Armored Core 6 that I don't know if I'll ever actually sit down to write but the main thrust is that Armored Core 6 frames the ability to re-evaluate your own identity as a path to power.↩