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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mannahnin" data-source="post: 9168466" data-attributes="member: 7026594">I was going to note the same.  While Rhaez' list is obviously silly and facetious, the points are real.  1) Made-up names avoid real-world cultural reference, and 2) they have the advantage from a corporate perspective of being copyrightable, 3) Made up names have the downside of not being immediately evocative or grounding.When I started playing Warhammer in the 90s they had paint colors like Blood Red, Bleached Bone, Tentacle Pink, etc. And these were reasonably descriptive but also easy for third party paint companies to do similar names for their matching paint colors.  Bloody Red, Bone Tan, Tentacular Pink, or what have you.  And GW did eventually rename their colors after their factions, with stuff like Iyanden Yellow, Biel-Tan Green, Space Wolf Grey, etc.  And yeah, they did similar with their factions which had more generic names.  Imperial Guard getting renamed Astra Militarum. Sisters of Battle to Adepta Sororitas, etc.  This makes it a little trickier for TPP to encroach on their IP.I don't think this approach is a perfect fit for D&D, though, because D&D doesn't have one big all-encompassing setting.  By design, D&D is meant to support both its published settings and homebrew settings.  And evoking archetypes from real world history, mythology, and folklore is very helpful for players to be able to imagine stuff.  If I use a made up name like "Jedi", or "Sith Lord" I've got to introduce people to the fiction  defining what the heck that is, so the word means something to them.Yeah, tastes and standards change over time, but I'm in a similar spot on those names.  Druid and Barbarian don't bother me at all.  My understanding is that the term "Shaman" was used generically/universalized a lot for decades, but that there's been some pushback on that practice in academia, because it is a term borrowed from a specific culture and the way the English term was defined has gotten kind of inappropriately applied to unrelated cultures like, e.g., Native American ones.</blockquote>

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