Character Names - How Do You Come Up With Yours?

[Man in the Funny Hat]

I use this list.

I make it up out of whole cloth based largely on what looks and sounds appropriate.

I steal shamelessly from fiction and from other players.

I also assemble my own lists occasionally, trying to write down whatever names I think up or come across that I can use later and have a few hundred in a seperate list gathered that way.

Once in a great while I've used name generators, software and table-based, but more as an inspiration to my own thinking than to be taken literally.

Often I have taken a word that I would associate with the character, look it up in a dictionary, and then started messing around with related words, anagrams and just changes to make it look and sound a little different. Best example was an elf I rolled up AGES ago for 1E. I wanted to associate the character with a star, an 8-pointed star. I made the star his symbol and decided "star" would be the translation of his name from elvish." I looked up star in the dictionary and saw it was based on the word aster, the root where we get asterisk (which means star...) played around with those words and letters and eventually decided "Aste" (to be pronounced AH-stah) was the right name.

That seems like a long clumsy process but it really only takes a few minutes. And if you intend to play a character for a long time then the right name can be very important, and the extra time getting just the right name is worth it.

I do not use names that are recognizeable as modern, real-world names unless the game setting IS real-world.

Joke names are okay by me - but only to a certain point.

Throwaway names are NEVER okay by me except AS a remark made in jest. Names like "Bob the Fighter" show that the player either has no imagination, no patience, or no REAL interest in the game at any but the most superficial level. These are players that I will not want to be playing with eventually for those reasons anyway so I make myself heard and understood when I see dead-giveaway signs like naming a character, literally, "Mister Cleric."

 

[Ry]

House rule in my campaign: Your character's name must start with your first initial or your last initial.

Makes it way more likely people will remember other characters' names.

 

[Merkuri]

House rule in my campaign: Your character's name must start with your first initial or your last initial.

That wouldn't work in our group. We play online and use pseudonyms even out of character, but I believe we have three people with the real first name "Nick", and one named "Nicole".

Of course, in our newest campaign we ended up with three characters whose names start with C, two of which start with "Cal".

 

[cignus_pfaccari]

Depends. In the past, I've:

1) Rolled syllables around until they felt right (for the half-dragon anthropomorphic tyrannosaur, Tolthrak sounded right);
2) Started with a word, changed a few letters around to taste (my user ID comes from CIGNA and Pacificare, two health insurers);
3) Pull one out of thin air from a name list;
4) Roll it up on the name generators in various books (which I've been doing lately)

For the life of me, though, the goliath honorific generator is hilarious. I can think of only one way someone's going to get the name Tentblesser.

Brad

 

[cignus_pfaccari]

House rule in my campaign: Your character's name must start with your first initial or your last initial.

Makes it way more likely people will remember other characters' names.

I find that people remember other PC names when they're used.

Also, sometimes a good name doesn't really show up until another PC sticks it to the other PC. Like, say, Gleep (the lone Athasian halfling on the all-whisper gnome crew of the SS Wiggles), or Death Blossom (the awnshegh name for a PC in our Birthright name...she had a flower growing out of her head, and died every session, sometimes twice in the same combat).

Brad

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

rycanada
House rule in my campaign: Your character's name must start with your first initial or your last initial.

Merkuri
That wouldn't work in our group. We play online and use pseudonyms even out of character, but I believe we have three people with the real first name "Nick", and one named "Nicole".

Of course, in our newest campaign we ended up with three characters whose names start with C, two of which start with "Cal".

Hey, don't sell your people short! An amazing amount of human communication is contextual, not simply verbal.

By that I mean, I was in a HS graduating class of 27 people- including 3 "Davids," 2 "Johns," a "Jon" and a "John-David." Despite this, we seldom had issues of confusion...

Years later in college, a small group of us threw a party based on the teachings of J.R. Bob Dodds & the Church of the Subgenius- yes, it was an excuse for drinking. At the door, everyone who came in was given a nametag that read "Hello, My Name Is Bob"- nobody was allowed to use any other name but "Bob" for the duration of the party. Despite the bacchanalian surroundings, you could shout "Bob" across the room and get a response from the person you were trying to talk to...it was simply eerie.

You never know- your players might get a kick out of playing a band of adventurers with the same name... something like "The 5 Dars" (spelled Dar, Darr, D'ar, Dhar and Daar).

 

[Thurbane]

I'm about 33% make-it-up, 33% random generators and 33% real world names and places.

...dunno what happened to that other 1%

 

[Doug McCrae]

House rule in my campaign: Your character's name must start with your first initial or your last initial.

Makes it way more likely people will remember other characters' names.

We write them down on the top of our character sheets. The other PCs in my game are Quartz Axiom (stone giant), Dobsky (ogre barbarian) and Orson (changeling druid).

 

[GreatLemur]

Random generators are where it's at. I've used the aforementioned Everchanging Book of Names a lot in the past, and it's completely awesome. Lately, though, my typical lazy-ass method is to grab a bunch of real world names of some specific cultural origin from Kate Monk's Onomastikon (ever gamer already has this bookmarked, right?), and throw them into this random word generator. I'll generate dozens of words just to find a name for one character, but it's awesomely quick and simple.

 

[Crazy Eights]

When coming up with a new character, after I have the concept, I usually figure out the translation for the defining theme for the character in a couple of languages and then mix and match the romanized spellings. Though this only really works when you have some really different languages. I usually use Japanese, Latin, Kannada, and English, but thats just personal preference 'cause those are the languages I speak. One thing thats nice about this is that it reminds me what my character is all about each time I sit down to play.