Re: Dungeon Fantasy party compositions
 

Our last fantasy game (though not DF) involved

1 - A half elf ranger/mystic archer with a bow and swords, and with a pet dog the size of a warhorse (SM 1)
2 - A baby platinum dragon somewhere in size between an elephant and a thing which eats elephants (SM 2)
3 - A My Little Pony sized winged unicorn (SM -2) wearing kevlar police K9 armor with inserts, who was a RPM Mage / Artillery platform wielding 8 BARs

Re: Dungeon Fantasy party compositions
 

It's called Town. It's where you go to sell your loot and to recharge your power items.

Re: Dungeon Fantasy party compositions
 

I never played him, but I did write up a nice half ogre scholar. He could carry his whole library with him on adventures.
Besides, I hate making cliche characters. That's why my SM+1 race has no IQ penalty. They have other issues.

Re: Dungeon Fantasy party compositions
 

LOL. So what do your characters do besides
stand around looking cool & stepping on
anything that twitches funny?

Interesting. Is there a "Wilderness" element to DF?

Re: Dungeon Fantasy party compositions
 

Well, you can invoke your GM privilege and restrict any races or classes you deem inappropriate - that's what I did, too, by restricting any races costing more than 25 CP.

But this One-Shot is supposed to show some newbies how to play with GURPS, and trying out some really weird races showcases the flexibility of the system IMO.

GURPS Dungeon Fantasy has no default system - it is kept deliberately generic. Personally, I am using it with my Doomed Slayers setting (available on DriveThruRPG, and hopefully soon on e23 although I have no idea how the submission process is for it at the moment) - the setting was pretty much written for the Dungeon Fantasy genre, but gives adventurers some important social context.

Re: Dungeon Fantasy party compositions
 

I made Kaberoi specifically to fill the "big strong guy" niche without being "big dumb guy". They aren't SM +1, but I wasn't targeting quite that big. If I were, I'd likely just add another +5 ST and +1 SM and wash my hands of it.

Re: Dungeon Fantasy party compositions
 

Nice to know I'm not the only grognardy grognard in on this discussion. I'm quickly discovering the flipside of the GURPS flexibility - just because the system supports something doesn't mean you should do it!

Re: Dungeon Fantasy party compositions
 

You mean, like Hengeyokai, Korobokuru, Minotaurs, Spirit Folk... and Kenders and Gully Dwarves? ;)

Re: Dungeon Fantasy party compositions
 

Bite your tongue!

Humans, Elves, Dwarves and Halflings, with Half-Elves and Half-Orcs thrown in for good measure. I never knew anyone to play Gnomes, back in the day.

Honestly, the next fantasy game I run will have Humans, and only Humans, as the only sentient race. Monstrous creatures will exist, but will be large and powerful monsters. And otherworldly critters like demons will be entirely made up of spirit, manifesting temporarily on our plane of existence.

And even then, I'll wind up with three wizards and a rogue, with no healing and no front-line combat power.

Re: Dungeon Fantasy party compositions
 

AD&D 1st edition royally screwed half orcs so badly it made me want to play one out of spite.

Re: Dungeon Fantasy party compositions
 

Gnomes weren't interesting before Dragonlance, and weren't mechanically tempting before 3e.

Re: Dungeon Fantasy party compositions
 

In 1980 I was playing a gnome fighter/illusionist. First, and only, halfling I ever saw came after the publishing of Unearthed Arcana, a fighter/thief double specialised in darts. I believe it retired when we banned most of UA.

Re: Dungeon Fantasy party compositions
 

From my groups in D&D, the only races I'd seen as PCs were humans, elves, half-elves, custom cat-folk with the same attributes as elves, and custom wolf-men with the same attributes as dwaves; these latter two were mostly used for clerics and paladins, respectively. Maybe our rogues were halflings sometimes, but I always remembered them as humans.

This probably contributes to why I've latched onto dwarves as awesome, and don't think they need much if any change from their depiction in bog-standard vanilla fantasy games. A dwarf wizard with a halberd-staff or a mace-wand is my favorite.

Re: Dungeon Fantasy party compositions
 

LOL. Exactly. I don't think I could handle it without it
routing into non-stop laughter & suspension of disbelief
entirely shattered. I figured PCs would simply be the
staple type of fantasy character, but with the GURPS
system. It would be interesting to see something like
OD&D in a GURPS system (where standard classes &
demi-human races are treated as stand-alone classes).

Stories where Dragons & Pixies are the main characters
is probably something I'd quickly bypass in a bookstore..but
I guess somebody likes it.

HAHA. Well I would stick the first 3 books of the
1st Ed, avoid '1.5' other than maybe flavor. I recall
friends creating PCs out of all the NPC classes that
showed up in Dragon. Like find somebody running a
6th level grave digger..lol. Those would probably
be good for an evil PC campaign I suppose.

But I guess some of those wild classes are part
of the DF books, so I guess I can't complain if
somebody uses it.

We always had a guy that played Gnome illusionists or
some sort of gnome as well. He was always very
disruptive to the game but would say he was in
character. I think his DMing skill was better
than his PC skill.

Does anybody play plain jane Fighters anymore??

Re: Dungeon Fantasy party compositions
 

It's not that far from what you get out of the vanilla GURPS: Fantasy as written - Elves start with Magery 0 and Unaging, while Dwarves get higher HT, gold sense and greed. Dwarves make natural warriors, Elves get to be automatically "multiclassed" if you want for them to be.

With a bit of tweaking of the racial template, you'd have OD&D.

Re: Dungeon Fantasy party compositions
 

And the next character is a human swashbuckler...

...with Weirdness Magnet.

Come to think about it, the player has given all his characters Weirdness Magnet so far. I really need to come up with something spectacular this time.

Re: Dungeon Fantasy party compositions
 

A lot of them were later generation AD&D, though. And setting dependent. If you could find a GM who'd let you play with Oriental Adventures race and/or you played Dragonlance, you had those races available.

To be fair, though, AD&D squashed player character monsters really badly . . . but earlier editions of D&D (Holmes blue-box D&D, for example, and OD&D) were fine with stuff like balrog player characters. You still had to start at level 1, so a 1 HD balrog was still pretty weak, and it might take a long time to level, but it was given the nod as okay.

Still, some people find it more fun to have pretty bland PCs in a strange world, instead of strange PCs in a strange world. It's really a matter of taste.

Just to be pedantic, you can't double specialize in darts. Or specialize at all if you are multi-classed. Per UA, page 18 - "Only melee weapons, excluding pole arms and the two handed sword, may be used in double specialization" and the latter per the UA errata publish in Dragon magazine 103, November 1985.

That said, at least one published module violated all the rules for specialization all over the place - characters with multiple specializations, often double (H2 The Mines of Bloodstone).

Re: Dungeon Fantasy party compositions
 

Back to the original topic -
I got three groups of DF players:

The “Ruins on the Bluff” vanilla crew:
Brother Smyth (Human, Cleric):
“Brother Smyth” is a Cleric of Wotan, God of Knowledge and Healing. His spells are mostly for healing, but he can throw a Sunbolt if need arises. In melee combat he uses a Mace and Shield.

Gimble Greenwheat (Halfling, Thief):
“Gimble” is a burglar. He is a master at hiding and sneaking, and is highly talented at opening locks and finding traps. Combat in not his forte. He will hide and snipe with his cross bow once in combat, or launch a surprise attack with his long knife if he must.

“Rook”, Thurin Stonebeard (Dwarf, Knight)
“Rook” is a Dwarven warrior. He is very skilled with his Axe and Shield. For ranged attacks, he has a crossbow and knows how to throw axes.

Willowwind Greenleaf of the Roanoaks (Wood Elf, Scout):
“Willowwind” is an elven ranger from the Roanoaks. She is talented at woodcraft, e.g., tracking, moving silently, navigating, etc. Her preferred weapon is a Composite Bow. She uses a quarter staff in melee combat.

Darien Tiberius (Human, Holy Warrior)
“Darien” is a Paladin of Protem the Light Bringer god of light and fire. His focus is fighting undead. He fights with a broadsword and shield. For ranged attacks, he has a crossbow.

Baer of the Blue Mountain Clan, (Human, Barbarian):
“Baer” is a huge (7’6”) human barbarian warrior. He wields a large sword in battle. He has a longbow for ranged attacks.

Saboo (Human, Martial Artist)
“Saboo” is a Discipline of the Tower of the Winds from the far east. He is skilled at unarmed combat, but will normally use a simple quarter staff. He carries a brace of Shuriken for ranged work.

Pascal de la Fort, (Human, Swashbucler):
“Pascal” is a wiry dexterous swordsman from the Azure Sea. He dual wields a pair of very fine sabers in battle. He has a brace of throwing knifes for ranged attacks.

Arcania Half-Elven (Half-Elf, Wizard)
“Arcania” is a wizardess in the Gray Guild. She knows a number of spells in the Air College, but also knows useful spells in the Fire, Knowledge, Light, Mind Control, Protection, and Sound colleges. She knows the Lightning and Explosive Lightning spells, but she is more of a scholar than battle wizard. She has her staff if she is forced into melee combat.

The “Blackwatch Legion” (DF Special Ops) current team –
“Vidar” (Shadow Elf Thief/Martial Artist); Team Infiltrator
“Ra’jir” (Cat-Folk Swashbuckler/Martial Artist); Team Close Combat-Weapons
“Forest” (Wood Elf Knight/Scout); Team Weapons/Shooter
“M” (High-Elf Wizard (specialist in the Fire College)); Team Demolitions
“Gunter” (Were-Bear Barbarian); Team Close Combat-Weapons
“Anastay Strix” (Nymph Wizard (Illusionist)); Team Face/Comm Specialist
“Azurite” (Mountain Elf Thief/Cleric), Team Medic / Backup Infiltrator


I’m preparing for my own one shot “The Monster M*A*S*H” (Murder*Assassination*Shanghai*Highjackers), and here is the current character list:
? (Corpse-Eater Thief) – A crazy (Phantom voices/split personality) Burglar
? (Dark-One Mystic Knight) – Doing the Death Knight thing
“Seth” (Elder-Spawn (Drow) Mentalist) – A Psientist / Tempest
“Ryder” (Elder-Spawn (Goblin) Cleric) – Earth God worshiper
“Oxyn” (Gargoyle Martial Artist) – An interesting build
? (Hell Gnome Bard) – (not sure about this one yet)
? (Infernal Scout) - (not sure about this one yet)
“Moag” (Ogre Knight (Halberd Weapon Master)) – Looks deadly

Re: Dungeon Fantasy party compositions
 

I play in two DF groups, both of which are actually pretty balanced.

Group 1:
Andreni - Wood Elf Greed Druid - The leader of our group, focusing almost singularly on plant spells.
Ironlimb - Ent Barbarian - He's the tank, he and Andreni have the Special Rapport advantage, and they wind up making sure that some of the other party members take care of nature.
Azriel - Celestial Cleric of a God of Death - Limited healing capability, lots of zombies.
Boziik - Shadow Elf Scout - Always good for putting two arrows into the foes vitals every turn.
Eybel/Kane - A human Psi - His has two disadvantage lists linked by Split Personality, so whenever something stressful happens the other personality pops out and takes over. Eybel is nice. Kane sets everything on fire and scalps slain foes...

Group 2:
Mandar - Human Holy Warrior/Barbarian - Tank, Healer, Leader. Stick in the mud about helping innocents, but that's probably not a bad thing.
Lakota - Human Druid - A beastmaster druid with a really good spell list and a bunch of animal allies. Basically he kicks butt better than any character than I've ever seen. I wish I had built Andreni closer to the way Braden built Lakota...
Rythe Doomblaster - Dwarf Demolisher - Explosives + Explosive temper for the win!
Oberon - Pixie Wizard - Really small and really smart. IQ 17 means that he's our go to for a lot of things because he has really good defaults.
Asaph - Nymph Bard - He's all communication skills and bardic magic. With a base +16 to reaction rolls and the Presence spell that's +32; he can reason with anything, although we've not had opportunity to negotiate with dragons or anything like that yet.

I play Andreni in Group 1, but in Group 2 I play Rythe and Asaph. Both games are by post, so it works out fine. Interestingly the groups are actually in the same world and have run into each other before, the gm made us split up again though, apparently gming two games of 5-6 is easier than one game of 11 lol. As you can see both groups are pretty well balanced with the exception of sometimes needing a thief, although group 2 makes due with the demolisher. "This door is locked." <Rythe places shattersand charge> BOOM! "What door?"

Re: Dungeon Fantasy party compositions
 

Well, if we're being all on-topic . . . The campaign that most strongly inspired DF had these PCs:

• Kaeso Curius Severus, a human alchemist and gadgeteer closest to what became the DF artificer.
  
• Leif the Lucky, a part-ogre, part-demon, mostly human barbarian, with what DF would call a druid or shaman lens (both and neither).
  
• Mushamee Potemkin, a straight-up human knight, right down to the sword, shield, and social status.
  
• Recnam Orcen, a cleric of the God of Death, complete with extensive holy powers and spells. Technically human, he eventually became partially undead. Yeah . . .
  
• Rufus Gordianus Falco, who singlehandedly inspired the justiciar added to DF in Pyramid #3/10. Also human.
  
• Vinz Clortho, human, whose exact profession was some combo of what DF would call assassin, martial artist, and wizard. Pick one and make the other two lenses.

Early on, there was another PC, played by a gamer who had to quit for family reasons:

• Vladimir Sepetski, a whip-wielding human slaver, closest to a DF thief in skills and attitude.

Prominent accompanying NPCs included:

• Brunhild, the 100% ogre grandmother of Leif. Definitely a barbarian. (Leif's granddad was around, too, but entirely as a kind of spirit guide.)
  
• Diandra, a human maidservant to Helena, and Leif's eventual wife. Functionally a low-points DF innkeeper.
  
• Helena Justina Claudia, human, the wife of Rufus and something like a DF 15 archer with the learned lens.
  
• Ilya, Josef, Oleg, and Vladimir, Mushamee's loyal bodyguards – all of them human – who would qualify as low-powered knights in their own right.
  
• Loclá, Vinz's apparently human lover, who would be hard to define in DF terms . . . a witch, and somewhere between the mentalist and the shaman in capabilities.

Re: Dungeon Fantasy party compositions
 

It doesn't bother you or your players when names of fictional characters are used as-is for PCs and their Dependants?

I find it jarring, personally.

Re: Dungeon Fantasy party compositions
 

Those bother you, but not Recnam Orcen and Vinz Clortho?

Anyway, having met some of Sean's players (during that campaign, actually), a little silliness seems to be expected in the group.

Re: Dungeon Fantasy party compositions
 

I know Vinz Clortho is from Ghostbusters, but I didn't recognise Recnam Orcen. Maybe the serial number is filed off better there?

In any event, any name that I can recognise from fiction bothers me if there is no plausible reason for it to be duplicated in the case of the character. One character sharing a name with another fictional character can be a coincidence, but once you put him in a relationship with a character that also shares a name with the fictional paramour of his fictional namesake, it more than stretches the bounds of coincidence. To me, that seems like something that would make it impossible to take the character seriously and thus, something designed to reduce the enjoyment I could derive from gaming.

Re: Dungeon Fantasy party compositions
 

Spell it backwards. Took me a second to get it too.

Re: Dungeon Fantasy party compositions
 

1. I don't care what my players name their PCs. It's none of my business. Choosing a PC's name is the highest player privilege. I refuse to be heavy-handed in that regard.

2. More generally, I don't find names jarring. After five years coordinating a huge first-year survey course at a university, where I had students whose real, legal names were swear words in English and/or whose parents must have been hippies (Starflower?), I'm immunized.

3. Those specific names you singled out mean nothing to me . . . If they're from fiction, it's fiction unfamiliar to me, and I don't do term searches on PCs' names.

Re: Dungeon Fantasy party compositions
 

Eh, it isn't beyond the realms of possibility that characters would adopt silly names like their profession backwards, as long as that name for their profession exists in their world. It's being named for fiction that doesn't exist in the setting or other such examples of meta-game artifacts that I mind, because that makes it harder to accept the game world as a place of its own.

Re: Dungeon Fantasy party compositions
 

I use collaborative design exclusively, so if a player decides that a name exists and makes sense in the setting, then it is so. A name is just a label, and in infinite worlds, it isn't especially unlikely that an infinity of completely unrelated people could by dint of large numbers share a name. I should add that none of the names I listed provoked even a snicker in actual play . . . people were aware of what I just said and simply took unusual names in stride. The only forbidden name in my group is "Boba Fett," owing to a certain (non-Star Wars, gaming-related) video that I shouldn't link here – and note that it's forbidden by consensus, not by GM fiat.

Re: Dungeon Fantasy party compositions
 

Everyone has their own style, of course. Personally, I couldn't abide playing in a setting where entire cultures spring into existence, regardless of surrounding geography, economic conditions and neighbouring cultures, by a throw-away decision to pilfer a fictional name for a character. It seems to have a very high risk of becoming a silly hodge-podge, with everything but the kitchen sink thrown in and a coherent history impossible to come up with.

Well, no, not as such.* However, names don't exist in a vacuum. If a given name exists, it brings with it a culture and language. Which is not a problem in a world that is not yet defined and relies on players to fill out the gaps, but is jarring and difficult when the world is defined, complete with cultural naming patterns that are quite different from what the player proposes.

*Though cases when not only the PC, but also his Allies or Dependants are taken straight from the same fictional source increase the unlikelihood considerably.

My experience has been that 'unusual'* names not only occasion comment by other players, they tend to ruin my motivation for GMing. I don't want to spend time detailing a world on which parties composed of Peter Pan the barbarian, Tinkerbell the knight or Dong McWeiner and his lovable crew of misfits boldly seek adventure.

Furthermore, I find that a PC name that is self-consciously silly or flat-out breaks the fourth wall tends to be a huge warning sign that the player in question is not prepared to roleplay anything beyond an impulsive murder hobo in a vaguely defined world. After all, if he doesn't take his PC seriously, why should he take the setting seriously?

*Well, a more accurate term would be 'deliberately silly'.

Re: Dungeon Fantasy party compositions
 

Sorry, but I don't see it – why must a name imply any of that? The modern world has no corner on the market of throwaway names with no links to the surrounding culture; you can find those in every culture ever, right down to a Chinese guy two millennia ago whose phonetic name would sound out as "John Doe" for no reason better than somebody liking how the written symbols looked. I work on the premise that PCs are abberations to begin with – people with remarkable abilities and destinies, making far more of a difference than everyone around them. When the PCs are all 150- or 250- or 400-point powerhouses in a world of 25- and 50-point folks, having big adventures while everybody else is working at a generic job . . . well, weird names almost make more sense to me.

Which isn't to say that I don't let players introduce cultures and such, because I do! However, they are required to do so within a framework – it isn't random. I just prefer to design the frame and let the players solve the setting Sudoku, so to speak.

But heroes' names aren't constrained because I have too much real-world experience that suggests to me that far more people are named weirdly, randomly, and culturally atypically than you might at first think.

This is not actually the case. You can find examples of completely made-up names with bizarre phonetics all over the place. My father, a historian and genealogist, likes to remind people of this, because the idea that all names have meaning and come from somewhere is a gross oversimplification. Plenty of people have just decided that some made-up phonetics that rhyme well are worth using over and over for whacky names. The idea that everybody is called something like Descriptive Name, Son of Profession Name, of Clan Region Name, is a valid zeroeth-order premise. However, the perturbations are quite large, and insisting on consistent naming from everyone in a region is actually more belief-shattering than allowing that a guy in the Congo might by fluke be called Hamish.

Again, I think this is an over-strong assumption. Why is a quirky name a sign of a poorly committed, bad roleplayer? Three of the best roleplayers I've ever met, really immersive types with a huge investment in the world, used goofy media-inspired names because they admired the characters in question, even though their PCs were nothing like those characters and not from worlds where those characters would fit. Given that I've met people whose parents named them after heroes from different cultures that existed 700 years ago on faraway continents, just because they liked the story, I have no problem with players doing basically the same thing.

This might be cultural in a different sense . . . It's possible that naming in Iceland is fairly consistent and traditional, I cannot say. I just know that in Canada, I can walk down the street and meet people whose legal names are, well, not traditional anywhere.

Re: Dungeon Fantasy party compositions
 

Actually, from what I know, that's the case. Legally regulated, even.

Re: Dungeon Fantasy party compositions
 

I feel the same way about a lot of silly names in games, after years of silly names in my own games. I used to get more bothered by it, but that's worn off. My current game has at least one in-joke silly name (Borriz the dwarf) and one fiction copy (Nakar, from Nakar the Abomination).

Off hand in play, I've had a Rand Althor, a Corell Seldarine (named after the elven gods from AD&D), a drow named Szandor, a paladin named "Graylock" because the guy who ran him lived in the Graylock Apartments, a Kurgen, an entire series of Dru the Druids (there was a Dru the 14th, and not because the guy had 13 generations of successful druid delvers), a Crestlin (based on Raistlin), a guy named Furious ("It's pronounced "furry-ous!"), a commando named Action Jackson, a Wyvern Intestineeater, a half-elf ranger/druid named Recon, and more I'm forgetting I'm sure.

That's putting aside the endless succession of guys named Rellik Retsam Noegnud run by this guy I knew in Junior High.

It used to bother me a bit more, but in the end, who cares? If the knight calls himself Tinkerbell and he's happy every session with that, that's fine. You can always say it's not a normal name, so now he's got a nickname or crazy parents, or just run with it and apply it to the culture. Either way, it doesn't detract from my fun. I do ask people with crazy names if they're sure they want it, but if they say yes, more power to them! Bring on the Wyvern Intestineeaters, I say.

Re: Dungeon Fantasy party compositions
 

I hate naming things. I usually get around it by labelling things and then stuffing the label through Google Translate to some random language and massaging the output until I can pronounce and spell it. The names often would qualify for "silly" except I've hidden them :)

* A large and somewhat thick-headed knight called Zezen Entziero (Basque for "Bull Roundup", last name stolen straight from the Running Of The Bulls), using the Lamborghini badge for his family crest and the little hood ornament on his helmet.
* Umptymillionth minotaur brute: Ystävä Karhut, "a friend of bears", with the Destiny "Bear Rider" and his official backround has him coming from Eura, although I'm sure the Finns would be surprised to hear that.
* Currently playing a Tiefling called "Torment Thomson" - Torment was a randomly generated name that's officially a "standard" Tiefling cultural name in 4e D&D, Thomson became her last name when we established she was the daughter of one of the GM's NPCs, and then suddenly we realized how... alliterative the name was. Some parents are just cruel like that, though.
* Mrugnak my ur-barbarian got his name via The Everchanging Book Of Names, seeded with examples of Tolkein's Black Speech. For the entire first session I played him (online), all of his conversation was generated by EBON as well.

Re: Dungeon Fantasy party compositions
 

A friend of mine said he wanted to try table top gaming because he thought of a name for a D&D character he had to use, but it wasn't until we sat down to roll it up that he told us he wanted to play "Snowjob Banana-monger". We had a lot of fun that night

Re: Dungeon Fantasy party compositions
 

Wow, that's wild! As you know, English Canada only cares when you try to name your kid the kind of thing that would be censored by the forums software. Québec is stricter, but as it loses more challenges than it wins, that doesn't matter in practice.

That's what I meant about differences in culture . . . I don't think that most people here care, which extends to how they regard the names of fictional characters. As I said, after five years running a course populated by many people with freaky hippy names like Angel-Star, and random quasi-Africanisms like Lashonda and Moshiq, I couldn't find it in me to care that a TL3 barbarian might be called Han Solo. Indeed, if the player thinks that Han Solo is the coolest hero ever, the name might even help her invest in the game, so more power to her.

Exactly! I've met so many living, breathing people with "crazy parents" and "nickname formally adopted as legal name" that I don't think anything of it in a make-believe world. Plus there's the fact that we can just say that the actual sounds people hear when the name is spoken in-world are totally different, and the name on the character sheet is merely the player's codeword for something entirely not-crazy that nobody at the gaming table could pronounce properly.

That's my rule as well. I don't let nutty names go uncommented, but if the comment evokes no change, then so be it.

Yes. My wife's name is "Bonnie Scott," which is pretty strange . . . Her entire family on both sides is of Scots descent, and what do you call a pretty Scots girl? "Bonnie." Oh, and her dad served on an aircraft carrier named the HMCS Bonaventure, nicknamed "Bonnie" by its crew. Yeah.

Her brother is "Robert Bruce Scott," which is equally corny in the Scots name department, if you know history.

C'est la vie. My real last name is "Punch," shared by no other family in the city where I grew up. It meant that I got punched repeatedly through 13 years of public school. Also, my first name, "Sean," is a joke here in Québec, because nobody has a clue how to say it and I'm forever being asked if it's "Jean" misspelled.

Re: Dungeon Fantasy party compositions
 

Norway has something related: changing one's family name is legally controlled. A friend who had one of the protected names explained that they used to be so socially advantageous that there was an outbreak of people changing their names to acquire advantage. So legislation was passed. Seems weird to me, but it's a somewhat different culture.

The British are a lot freer about this stuff, but are subject to fashion: you can often make a good guess at when someone was born from their name.

Re: Dungeon Fantasy party compositions
 

None of the names mentioned since the topic came up have sounded particularly weird to me, they all just sound like names.

My human wizard was named Thane Q. Greenaxe. I eventually decided that the Q. was short for Queue, once I found out how to pronounce that word and realized it would leave the full and abbreviated versions the same. "Greenaxe" was arrived at by looking through a table for randomly generating names in D&D 3e, but I decided I liked two of the words from the first column so much I wasn't going to bother rolling.

Re: Dungeon Fantasy party compositions
 

The last time I decided to create a setting, I chose to include as much input from my players as possible, as long as it was consistent. Most where non-gamers at the time.

I told them during character generation that they were free to choose whatever name suited them, as long as it was somewhat pronouncable ("please not several glottal stops"). I informed them that I would use their choice to color the world when deciding on the names of places, other people.

So by saying :
"So if you choose a Iroquois-sounding name for your guy, other guys from his tribe/culture/whatever will have Iroquois-sounding names, your place of birth should sound Iroquois and so on... but of course it does not mean their culture is anything like real-Earth Iroquois."

I got some very classical things :
- Dwarves with Norse names
- Human faux-feodal kingdom with Old French vibe
- Sindarin-themed Wood Elves

but also Inca pirates, German sounding Grey Elves (as well as some human communities), Welsh and Celts gnomes, a Japanese city-state, Babylonian orcs and so on. My copy of the Extraordinary Book of Names sees a lot of use since this decision :). This is not stricktly enforced for new PCs, but I have been asked before if the culture already had a theme. It works well, I had no problems of either Bobba Fett or "names with a lot of G's and K's".

I wanted to convey that a given place had been a commercial waypoint at some point in the past. The names of the NPC made my players realize that.

It also worked the other way around, where the names of a few NPC created before the PC became clues on their origins. When, later on, I worked on the history of the setting, divergence points, migration paths and past empires had to be consistent with that. Overall, it was a great experience.

Re: Dungeon Fantasy party compositions
 

Spanish speakers might be interested in knowing that my wife works with a Phillipina woman whose name is, I kid you not, Feli Navidad.

In the end, there's nowt as queer as folk.

Re: Dungeon Fantasy party compositions
 

Regarding character names, I said I didn't mind names established as queer in the setting, with appropriate consequences, assuming that the player really wants that. What I dislike is names that break the fourth wall and/or are going to sound silly in setting as well, but are meant to be accepted in-setting as normal.

I'll also admit that in Iceland, names are expected to conform to linguistic and cultural norms and names which do not clearly identify someone as being of foreign origin. Now, being foreign is not automatically bad, but it's an example of a common fictional and real situation, where names denote social status or ethnic origin. This is going to come up a lot in historical or quasi-historical settings.

The modern world, especially immigrant polities like those in North America, is actually not representative of much of history in this regard. It is far more common in history for names to mark people as being of a certain origin or social status than for them to mean nothing at all. I'll grant that there exist other cosmopolitian, multi-ethnic societies in the throes of massive social change in history, but this is nowhere near the universal standard.

If I am, as I have sometimes been, playing a Roman Late Republic game, I don't want to see characters that are supposed to be aristocrats with names that everyone is going to assume are slave names. Particularly not if the player is not willing to roleplay the subsequent social stigma and misunderstandings, but simply chose a name without thinking about the setting.

In general, I don't view choosing a name for a PC as a privilege for players, I see it as one part of their duties to present a character that fits into the setting in a consistent way and enables the GM and other players to collaborate with him in telling stories in the desired genre. And unless that genre is deliberate mockery of gaming, I don't want a name that is deliberately silly and potentially jarring to immersion in the game world.

Re: Dungeon Fantasy party compositions
 

I'm sorry, swear words as names? Anything interesting there? How does that happen?

Re: Dungeon Fantasy party compositions
 

Like (IIRC) Sacrement or Chalice?

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Those are swear words in Quebecois French; specifically Joual French but it's spread pretty broadly across Quebec in the last 30-40 years. But you spell them differently (phonetically) when you mean the swear word, in order to avoid offending people.

The pronunciation in English is different so they're not swear words in English, even if said in front of Quebecois. Chalice shouldn't offend anyone; French doesn't even have the CH sound, and the em-PHA-sis is on the wrong sy-LA-ble (to repeat an old joke).

On the other hand, the French word for a baby seal (phoque) is pronounced like an English word for the reproductive act that would be censored on this forum. There's really only so many one-syllable sounds the human body can make, and even less that an Anglophone can hear - short names are popular for the convenience value (either as given names or as commonly used nicknames), and one syllable words also tend to be used for basic swear words so you can scream them properly when you hit your thumb with a hammer. There's eventually bound to be a collision between the two sets.

You don't even need to bring in foreign languages though: the short form for Richard is Dick, and although that short form has great historical weight, English-speaking schoolboys all over North America still get the giggles over it.

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It gets me that they mention sailors and truck drivers specifically.

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My pastor's wife teaches ballet and had a little girl in one class whose name was pronounced 'shi-thay-ed', but spelled ****head. That's an example, as for how it happens I have no freakin' clue.

So while I am a fan of creativity in character naming, I also think that there should be some sort of law in the US to help protect children from stupid parents who would name them ridiculous things like that.

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A few years ago me and my dad hired a cleaning lady whose name is Sayonara, we have also met a Madeinchina.

People will name their kids after anything, even a label they dont understand.

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Kromm, if you ever come to Gothenburg and play in one of my games you should probably expect to be handed a list of names. That's just an unspoken rule of my group. Names carry meaning.

Of course, we might work it out as a quirk. If people react poorly to you when they find out you're named after the Big Bad Necromancer... that might be worth a point. But it's still a name that exists in the world.

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Since the necro has already been done, I'll say this:

My DF game has had Holden M'Hari-Balzac and his brother Fondlyn. I tolerate this sort of thing in DF, but I do actively discourage it more "serious" games, because I think it ends up being something that the player regrets when they realize they are stuck with it, and of course the SoD issues.

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Alien Nation had a running joke that the main human character's name Sikes sounds like a swear word in their language, phonetically syikes as in excrement-head.

My mom knew a guy named Harry Dick. Yes, he went by Harry not Harold.

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Since this thread was bumped anyway, I feel I should add a comment that a friend once decided (after having never played an RPG) he wanted to play D&D, solely because he wanted to play a character named "Snowjob Bananamonger"

EDIT: Apparently I already shared this in the thread. I have no recollection of that.

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I went to school with a black kid named '******'. I still remember the first day when the teacher asked "so how do you pronounce that? Ni-ger? Ni-GER...?"

"It's pronounced ******."

"Ok... Ni-ger."

He came from Niger, so I guess the word just didn't have that connotation there.