Dungeon Fantasy party compositions

[Peter V. Dell'Orto]

Originally Posted by Kromm

Sorry, but I don't see it – why must a name imply any of that?

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.

[Bruno]

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.

[Cybren]

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

[Kromm]

Originally Posted by Bruno

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

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.

Originally Posted by Toadkiller_Dog

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.

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.

Originally Posted by Toadkiller_Dog

I do ask people with crazy names if they're sure they want it, but if they say yes, more power to them!

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.

Originally Posted by Bruno

Some parents are just cruel like that, though.

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.

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by Bruno

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

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.

[simply Nathan]

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.

[thirqual]

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.

[joncarryer]

Originally Posted by Kromm

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.

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.

[Icelander]

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.

[Blood Legend]

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