Would this break a fantasy setting for you?

[Dannyalcatraz]

Seikes ment something demeaning IIRC.

As I rcall, Sam Francisco told him his name meant head.

What is so amusing of blood mist in German? Or rather to Germans?

"Mist" is German for manure...which is why Irish Mist had difficulty cracking the German market.

 

[RPG_Tweaker]

It seems to me that the "inappropriateness" of certain character names in RPGs is an unavoidable side-effect of having player-based character design.

IRL I didn't get to decide my name any more than I did my hair or eye color. My parents picked my given name, and I was saddled with a surname chosen centuries ago by Italian ancestors.


In a fantasy setting, the issue is amplified by the fact that most GMs don't have fully realized, Tolkien-class, cultural histories or languages of the various species/races to allow the player to formulate a native name. Instead the player either picks/adapts one from RL/fiction... or creates one whole-cloth from imagination.... either way, the name is artificial and not organic.

So unless people are willing to have the GM (as their NPC parents) choose a campaign appropriate name for them, or just hand them a pre-made sheet saying, "this is what you were born as"... players will continue to make characters that are effectively aliens to the game-world's culture.

 

[Haltherrion]

In a fantasy setting, the issue is amplified by the fact that most GMs don't have fully realized, Tolkien-class, cultural histories or languages of the various species/races to allow the player to formulate a native name. Instead the player either picks/adapts one from RL/fiction... or creates one whole-cloth from imagination.... either way, the name is artificial and not organic.

That's a fair point but there are still those players who try to make something that seems fitting, given what little they may know about the setting and those that just pick discordant names to be cute.

To tie back to a few relatively recent threads: campaign setting notes before character generation can help with this problem if they either provide a list of setting appropriate names (much as 4E PHB does for common racial names) or provide enough history with named people in it to provide the flavor. In both cases, there is no need to use one of those names but having some idea how elves are named in this world should give you a basic idea.

In the end, for a player to pick a discordant name is just disresectful of the ref and other players unless it is understood that the game is whimsical. Similarly, I find it disrespectful of the author to do the same in a serious fantasy book.

As an aside, my group has been using a draft process for PC creation that has the PCs choose painted figures. In the most recent draft paperwork, my co-ref and I just referred to the figure name by the manufacturer's names (in drafts past, they were referenced by a serial number). These are, as one might imagine, perfectly reasonable fantasy sounding names and several players actually used the figure name as their PC name. Why create a new one if the label applied already seems nice? I didn't have any issue with it.

 

[WayneLigon]

Other characters have been Clive Clemens, King Mark Drake, Queen Jennifer, Princess Janet, Eliot Spears, Iris Gladstone, Gary Bunsen, Buddy Ims, Jack, Tom Gillian, Ted Maerks, Megan Drake, and Sir Bob Kay.

I don't look at them so much as 'modern names' but rather 'perfectly serviceable English names'. It would not break the setting for me so long as most people had such names. If everyone else has 'random syllable fantasy names' and one guy is named 'Fred' - regardless if you could produce 'Fred' from the vague rules governing naming some campaign have - then 'Fred' would probably break the setting for me.

Due in some part to 'The Horror of Hook Mountain', most hill giants and ogres now seem to come out with backwoods hillbilly names in my game, like 'The Cletus Brothers', at least in the GM narrative ("Meanwhile, Bocephus, the youngest of the Cletus Brothers, picks up a squealing pig and throws it at Dane, knocking him off the horse...")

And kudos for picking up the Eddie Lacross series Fun stuff.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

If everyone else has 'random syllable fantasy names' and one guy is named 'Fred' - regardless if you could produce 'Fred' from the vague rules governing naming some campaign have - then 'Fred' would probably break the setting...

It depends: if the guy's full name is something like "Zarytsinnifred" or "Frediochinothertis", someone may well have have given him the nickname of "Fred" at some point, out if ease of pronunciation.

I did something like that with a Githzerai Monk/PsyWar/Lucid Cenobite I ran some years ago. His arrival in port as the sole survivor on a "plague ship", his yellowish skin and a long name starting off with "Zjax" earned him the nickname "Yellow Jack." (An old term for Yellow Fever.)

 

[domino]

Most "modern" names aren't all that modern anyways. Unless a character is named something like IPod McFighterjet, odds are there's going to be at least several hundred years of precedent for that name. Shakespeare was writing about King "Harry" over 400 years ago.

Daniel, Michael, Matthew, Timothy, Mary(ia), Sarah, Jason, Phillip, Hector, are all several thousand years old. And so on.

 

[Dykstrav]

Would that affect your suspension of disbelief? Would it feel the "same"?

It'd severely impact my enjoyment of the game. I don't know if "suspension of disbelief" necessarily applies because we're talking about make-believe, after all, and it's not really worth discussing whether or not someone is using their own imagination "correctly." It'd definitely impact my immersion, which is perhaps a more accurate way to describe it.

It'd probably be a deal-breaker for me in a medieval-type fantasy setting. I think that using contemporary elements can only go so far before it becomes silly. Tim the Enchanter in Monty Python and the Holy Grail comes immediately to mind. So does Year One, which uses period names but modern forms of speech and cultural idioms.

 

[RedTonic]

When I was younger, I was definitely more into the unmemorable collection of sounds that make up most of the elvish in the Tolkien fantasy milieu. Now, I happen to like epithets more, since they're memorable. Innumerable bouts of minor head trauma have probably affected my short term memory, so that's a pretty big deal to me.

I was once much more critical of naming conventions in books and in my games, but since meeting a rather nice drill sergeant named "Cleophus," I've relaxed a good deal. Still, I'm aggressive about a name meshing with established naming convention--probably too aggressive. If my campaign's full of silly names, you better come wearing your damned best silly name hat.

 

[karlindel]

I do not have a problem with most "modern" names in a fantasy setting. However, it would bother me if a character's entire name were the same as a celebrity or the like (i.e. Angelina and Brad are fine, but Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt are not).

I do think that different people have different ideas about what names are "modern". Most modern names have a lot of history behind them (behindthename.com is a useful resource for this). I often use common names for random NPCs (there have been many named John, Jack, Paul, Brian, etc.). Bob may seem a bit jarring to some, and I would never use it for a PC, but I don't have a problem for it for NPCs.

 

[3d6]

I use normal-sounding names for NPCs, and I think its been working pretty well. For example, the PCs have allied with noble named Demetrius and a bandit named Johann against Count Daniel. People can write stuff down, and don't need to worry about how to spell things, or how to pronounce names from their notes. It also makes it much easier on me if I need to quickly name a new NPC.