The Most Popular D&D Character Name Is "Bob"

MechaPilot · May 16, 2019

Hey, my real name is #7 on the list.

MechaPilot · May 16, 2019

Morrus said:
What's the name of your D&D character?

As I suspect is true for most players, I have a few characters in different games at the moment:

Drea (a darve, i.e. alternate version of drow, assassin played in a modern game that mixes d20 modern and 5e).
Velishra (a tiefling wizard who ascended to actual demonhood)
Evedra (a human utility wizard who's mute because her tongue was cut out).
Mallucia (an asimaar light cleric who gets her powers from her belief in herself as a nacent hellgoddess)

Morrus said:
What these stats appear to tell us is that nearly 10% of people call their character "Bob", and about 12% seems to just use their class name, such as "Cleric" or "Bard". Lots of people seems to name their characters after Game of Thrones' Varys, but spell it differently, and lots like "dark" names like Ash, Raven, Ember, and Shadow.

Lilith is also a dark name. IIRC, it means night in Hebrew. The name is also probably related to Lilitu, the Sumerian goddess of night. And, it has a place in the Midrash as Adam's 1st wife who refused to submit to him and ended up becoming a consort of demons.

Traveller · May 16, 2019

MechaPilot said:
Lilith is also a dark name. IIRC, it means night in Hebrew. The name is also probably related to Lilitu, the Sumerian goddess of night. And, it has a place in the Midrash as Adam's 1st wife who refused to submit to him and ended up becoming a consort of demons.

LaYLa - is night in Hebrew (Capitals are consonants, lower case are vowels ) ,
but Semitic languages are root based so the connection is there.

As you said in the Midrash (Post 2nd temple period - 3rd century) she is basicly a Demon.
The rest of her stories might not be safe for Noah Gran, so will be skipped....

In Modern Jewish Mythology, the lack of a Jewish Vampire was much bemoaned, so Lilit takes that place.

Tony Vargas · May 16, 2019

Morrus said:
What's the name of your D&D character? The folks at D&D Beyond have released some more stats, and this time they're sharing the top 15 D&D player character names.

What these stats appear to tell us is that many people call their character "Bob",

Wellp, I guess that finally puts all those D&D Beyond stats into perspective.

MechaPilot · May 16, 2019

Traveller said:
LaYLa - is night in Hebrew (Capitals are consonants, lower case are vowels ) ,
but Semitic languages are root based so the connection is there.

As you said in the Midrash (Post 2nd temple period - 3rd century) she is basically a Demon.
The rest of her stories might not be safe for Noah Gran, so will be skipped....

In Modern Jewish Mythology, the lack of a Jewish Vampire was much bemoaned, so Lilith takes that place.

I had always been told "Lilith" means "night" in Hebrew. However, upon reading your post I looked it up, and (apparently) it come from the Akkadian word "Lilitu," meaning "of the night." Which, puts it more in line with the Sumerian goddess, and might be related to why the name was demonized in the Midrash. Lots of religions have a habit of demonizing the deities of other religions.

Also of an interesting note is that it was apparently translated as "Lamia" in the Vulgate Latin bible. So, it could technicnally be linked to a few different monsters: namely, Lamia, Vampires and Succubi.

Thank you for the correction. I always enjoy learning things (or discovering more depth to things I already knew).

*hat tip

Prakriti · May 16, 2019

Bob was your uncle. Now he's your Cleric.

Blue · May 16, 2019

Parmandur said:
They talk about it every time they go over the data in these videos. There are able to filter based on activity on a sheet that indicates actual play. Their numbers they provide also match up with what WotC has said for years based on their in-depth surveys, such as with Feats, so the data matches what is known from other sources, lending it credibility..

See, right here is a great example of why this data is dangerous when not ibnterpretted right.

There is literally NO WAY to look at characters and know if there is a featless game. Only the opposite. But a character without feats doesn't even necessarily lean (>50% correlation) in the direction of a featless game until probably the 2nd or maybe third 3rd ASI. And they have told us they have less data there. Even then it just means it's more likely, not that it's true.

Trying to use that to collaborate self-selected survey results (a system with well documented biases) that most games are featless (which it doesn't meansure does nothing. It's actively harmful because it tricks people into thinking there is evidence from multiple sources saying the same thing so it's likely true. When they don't say the same thing, and there are issues with the data collection.

D&D Beyond also has self-selection issues for who uses it. No one in either of my groups do. In addition, some types of data collection is compounded on that some offered content is free and some is gated by cost. Feats are one of these. Between the basic rules and the OGL, only the Grappler feat is listed. So anything they say about feats is even more suspect - either it's using the full player base, many (the majority?) won't have access to feats (outside Grappler) or they are reducing to a fraction of the sample size to those who purchased that content.

So we have two pieces of data, both self-selected and one further distorted by gatekeeping, that are sorta-adjacent but are verifiable not the same thing, but because they are presented as such we get a lot of smart people thinking that we have confirmation about the majority of games being feat-free.

But we don't.

And that sort of bias confirmation is the danger of appoaching these as anything more than they are. Taken as they are it's great data. But it's not a representitive of games as a whole. Any more than Bob is the most popular character name in actual play.

Satyrn · May 16, 2019

MechaPilot said:
Hey, my real name is #7 on the list.

They named a Borderlands character after you! I'm so jealous.

MechaPilot · May 16, 2019

I blame the proliferation of Bobs on the Knights of the Dinner Table.

I recall one comic where Bob the player was playing his character, also named Bob, who died and was replaced by Bob II.