What etiquette rules do we assume is common in the community?

[Cordwainer Fish]

I'm fine with silly names. Any name can sound silly.

Unusual names are fine. Names should be unusual in unusual settings. Joke names set a tone I don't want.

 

[Clint_L]

A couple of posters mention choice of character names, which raises the question of players who choose “silly” names and whether this impacts on other players and their suspension of disbelief.
The reason I raise this is that my tabletop group tends to play quite serious and dark-ish fantasy, but we used to have a player who insisted on somewhat juvenile pun names for his character, which the rest of us found irritating in the role play sense.
Examples included Wassin Aname, Biggus Dickus, Reetard and similar. He left the group for other life reasons but I certainly found his name choices annoying.
Maybe I was wrong?

Yeah, I mentioned this one, so I will speak to it.

For me, joke names usually go against our first rule, which is treating other players, including the DM, with respect. Joke names often (and especially at school) indicate an attitude that the game is being treated as a joke, that the player isn't serious about engaging in a cooperative storytelling game. Alternatively, a joke or meme name might indicate that they don't really understand what a TTRPG is. Or, it might signal embarrassment, that they don't want to be seen as taking this ridiculous pastime too seriously, so are trying to salvage some cool.

In the first instance: no. My games are far from deadly serious, but if you are going to treat the game itself as a joke then this is not the right activity for you, because that attitude is deadly to the entire campaign and will wreck it for everyone else.

In the second circumstance, I am saving you from yourself, because your name is going to be an embarrassment once you understand what we are doing.

In the third case, I get it. I grew up in an era when playing D&D was a basically a scarlet letter. Still, it's not okay to cover our embarrassment by subtly throwing shade on the entire group and activity.

This is a rule that I've thought long and hard about, because it generally goes against my policy of maximizing players' freedom to run their own characters. However, I have decades of experience as a teacher of teenagers, and even more decades of experience as a DM, often of teenagers, to draw up here, and joke names just never end well.

My rule about not stealing from the party is similar in that it limits player freedom. It's not one I need at my home games, because we are all adults and if someone stole from the party, there would be good character or story reasons for it, and everyone would get it, presumably. But at a game full of teenagers, many of them beginners...disaster! Usually the group immediately implodes, everyone gets mad at the player doing it, grudges are held...it's not good. So this is a "saving them from themselves" rule until they have more life experience. We only have two hours for each session, and don't need to spend 45 minutes arguing about whether the rogue should get to steal the +1 longsword out from under the fighter and sell it (this was the incident that led to the rule).

Oh, and if, per the example above, if a teenaged player came to the table and named their character "Reetard," I would immediately shut that down and have a private word with the student about how completely and absolutely insulting and unacceptable that kind of language is. If an adult came to my table and did that, I...well, I don't know what I would do, because I would probably be flummoxed by an adult human being being such an ignorant jerk. I certainly would not play a TTRPG with them. I suspect your games were much better with that person gone. You were not wrong!

 

[Faolyn]

A couple of posters mention choice of character names, which raises the question of players who choose “silly” names and whether this impacts on other players and their suspension of disbelief.
The reason I raise this is that my tabletop group tends to play quite serious and dark-ish fantasy, but we used to have a player who insisted on somewhat juvenile pun names for his character, which the rest of us found irritating in the role play sense.
Examples included Wassin Aname, Biggus Dickus, Reetard and similar. He left the group for other life reasons but I certainly found his name choices annoying.
Maybe I was wrong?

I have someone in my group like this, although fortunately she chooses... less obnoxious names. She favors tabaxi and gives them names like PerFloof McMeow. Everyone in the group just calls him Per, because yeah, it is immersion-breaking.

 

[MGibster]

A couple of posters mention choice of character names, which raises the question of players who choose “silly” names and whether this impacts on other players and their suspension of disbelief.

Like so many game related questions, this one depends entirely on the game. I've got one player who pretty much always gives his character one of two names. It's a normal Anglo-American name, we'll say Bob for the purpose of this thread, but it's pretty much the same no matter the game we play. It's mildly annoying, but I've just come to accept that this guy does not like to think of names for his characters and I roll with it. (To be fair, once in a while he does come up with original names and when he does they're not so bad.)

A few years back, I was really annoyed with one of my players in my Trail of Cthulhu game. Set in New York during the 1930s, this player make a psychologist and named him Osiris Thoth Van Roth. This was after the player had gone over several character concepts that did not fit the parameter of the campaign, so to me, it felt like the name was kind of a middle finger. But I simply shook my head and rolled with it. The funny thing about ToC, is the GM is encouraged to make changes to the world without telling the player as their character starts to lose Sanity. So one day Osiris shows up to work and sees the name Oscar Van Rice on his door instead of Osiris Thoth Van Roth.

In my Angel (of Buffy fame) game, one of the players decided to name his character Chaiporn Gunmoontree. This was a game in contemporary Washington state. The player got this from the name of a real person, or at least their stage name, who worked as a stuntman on some martial arts movies produced overseas. Based on the name, I had assumed this was a passive aggressive way of telling me he wasn't really interested in the campaign. But he envisioned his character has having hippie dippy type parents who gave him a stupid name he has to live with. I rolled with it.

 

[R_J_K75]

Two things that really aggravated me
1) I had a player who would bring his stank ass dog to games at my house after I repeatedly told him not to. I kicked him out of the group for that amongst a few other reasons
2) I hated showing up at someone's house to play and they had no table or even a coffee table to play at. There's no place to write, roll dice, lay out maps or battle mats & minis. To make things worse people are spread out between sofas, recliners, milk crates or love seats so that in and of itself just makes it hard to keep people attention. If I were to show up to play nowadays and came across this situation again, I wouldn't even bother playing. Back in my late teens and early 20s this was actually a pretty common occurrence as most of my friends lived in sparsely furnished apartments and it made for pretty crappy games.

 

[S'mon]

Be sober.

Here in England, the player who doesn't drink alcohol during the game is the one likely to get the weird looks.

 

[BookTenTiger]

No cross, no crown. (Yes, that means T-shirts.)

What does this mean?

 

[Cordwainer Fish]

What does this mean?

No religion and no politics.

(Yes, everything is political. But when I am around, the only politics and the only religion are those in the game world, and if you mention your own you're gone. Permanently.)

 

[R_J_K75]

Here in England, the player who doesn't drink alcohol during the game is the one likely to get the weird looks.

Same here in Buffalo, NY. It was very common when were early to mid-teenagers for our friends parents to offer us beers. Now that's etiquette

 

[R_J_K75]

No religion and no politics.

(Yes, everything is political. But when I am around, the only politics and the only religion are those in the game world, and if you mention your own you're gone. Permanently.)

Regardless whether I'm gaming or just hanging out, any conversation about politics or religion never ends well, so I try and change the subject immediately. Add alcohol and it becomes 1000 times worse.