D&D 5E Do you love Awesome Names?

[Corwin]

Back in the 2e heyday, we loved playing Al Qadim. With its unique races outlook and exotic classes, we had all manner of crazy, cool characters. I remember playing an ogre textiles merchant for a while. Stuff like that. Well, one day I decided to bring in a new PC to the game. He was a plain ol' human fighter. Your basic desert nomad type. I ended up naming him Djinar Ik-Fatir.

Give it a second. It'll come to you...

 

[Yardiff]

It depends on the game being played. One persons awesome is another persons groan and head shake.

I just read a cool name that I'll probably use on my next character if I remember. Joe Kerr

In a traveler game I played a skilled pilot named Ford Harrison.

 

[Scrivener of Doom]

I don't allow real world names, joke names, or names with superfluous apostrophes. This is one of the few hard and fast rules of my games and I will happily kill a PC with a bad name.

I run Forgotten Realms normally and I have a spreadsheet with a list of nearly 5,000 names by Ed Greenwood so my players have a list of suitable names to choose from. (It also does double duty as a source of NPC names.)

 

[Al'Kelhar]

...
My newest character (for a 13th Age game using Dark Sun) is a Roguish Entertainer by the name of Khanjali Mac - Khanjali = a form of Asian knife, Mac 'the knife'. His form of entertainment - Knife Throwing.

Why not The Blue Rajah?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9DJWMVR_yfM

Cheers, Al'Kelhar

 

[Jefe Bergenstein]

Back in the 2e heyday, we loved playing Al Qadim. With its unique races outlook and exotic classes, we had all manner of crazy, cool characters. I remember playing an ogre textiles merchant for a while. Stuff like that. Well, one day I decided to bring in a new PC to the game. He was a plain ol' human fighter. Your basic desert nomad type. I ended up naming him Djinar Ik-Fatir.

Give it a second. It'll come to you...

Quite possibly the best D&D I ever ran was a 3E Al-Quadim campaign that heavily drew from romance anime tropes. The party was a boy band called the Djovial Djinns. It was a ridiculous cartoon of a campaign that several of us cried during, and also featured a session where the main goal was to sell the concept of toilet paper over wiping with your hand to the grand caliph

 

[guachi]

One thing I kind about Mystara/The Known World is that many of the nations are basically not-X analogs from Earth. So names of PCs and NPCs can be Earth names that are generally easier to remember, pronounce, and gives players a quick sense of an NPC just from his name.

 

[Jeremy E Grenemyer]

Of course Awesome Names are Awesome.

Game doesn't really work without them.

 

[Lanefan]

I've encountered a Bob the Human. Oddly, his player turned into an excellent player. He was brand new, never rolled a Platonic solid before, never role-played before. He took about 30 minutes to grok what was going on, but stuck to the name and role-played the character as an amnesiac.

One of my favourites was a character (not mine) whose initial rolled-up stats were somewhat less than impressive...and thus was born Knottwoor.

Knottwoor Thmutch.

The closest I ever came was having a cavalier whose warhorse was a mare named "Buttercup."

Very first character in my current campaign was a Cavalier who called his horse White Lightning despite its being jet black in colour. (disclaimer: it's a generally accepted trope in our games that intelligence is the dump stat for Cavaliers and sometimes the horse is smarter. Sir Kalvin was a real standout in this regard as his starting intelligence was, I think, 10; the average of most other Cavaliers was about 7)

It was a great deal of fun. We just flat-out attacked a couple of storm giants who weren't even doing anything. We were trying to commit suicide, because all of us are bored with our characters. Still didn't work. Dang it.

There are few things in this unverse so resilient as an adventuring party. Worse than weeds, they are.

Another name story: a character in a game run by a friend (that I'm not in) is named Sodoff, as that was the first thing heard from the player on being asked "What's your name?" by the DM.

Lanefan

 

[Jacob Marley]

Say Aliens was a game session. Was the player of Hudson was being the jerk because he wasnt being serious enough?

How does the name Hudson not fit with Ripley, Hicks, Bishop, or Burke. Seems to me like Hudson's player understood the tone. Now, if you are referring to how Hudson was played, then you've exceeded the context of this thread - which was discussing awesome versus serious NAMES.

The tone of the game is a group effort by all the players. Moreover, tone is not some homogenous thing in the campaign world.

Indeed. Hence: If the game is serious, play serious; if the game is humorous, play humorous. This is a reference to names.

At the start of any campaign I have run there has been a discussion among the players and myself as to how we want the campaign to feel. Do we want beer and pretzels or Game of Thrones or whatever. As the game emerges there will absolutely be moments of levity in a serious campaign and moments of sadness in a humorous campaign. That's to be expected. The problem comes when you have one player who insists on making Fighty McFighterface when the rest of the group wants Game of Thrones. That person is being the jerk.

What kind of jerkwad decides to play a guy named "Fatty" Arbuckle! Didn't he know that the DM had a very serious campaign arc for his character? How are people supposed to buy into this trial adventure with a name like Fatty?!

The name "Fatty" was given to him by his classmates. My first post in this thread I said I am entirely fine with nicknames being given to characters, even humorous ones within an otherwise serious campaign.

Well, one of the tests I'm going to do if-when joining a new group is to try a bit of humour...the results will go a long way to determining whether I come back, for in my eyes a game without humour is a game without life. If that makes me a wankpuppet, well...can't help you there.

The group I play with frequently laughs and jokes throughout a campaign. And yet our PC names are serious. Do you come back?

 

[lowkey13]

*Deleted by user*