For some inexplicable reason, my characters always end up with the name “Thongor”.
Thongor the barbarian.
Thongor the half-elf ranger.
Thongor the vampire.
Thongor the vault dweller.
Thongor the Jedi.
I keep telling myself that next time I really will choose a name that’s more fitting to the milieu, but somehow it just never happens.
Anybody else have quirks around character names?
Unless I’m just using “Grumman”, I like to give my characters appropriate names, like “Joseph Graves” in Urban Dead, “Kira Toran” in KOTOR, or some vaguely evil high fantasy name I can’t remember for my necromancer/elementalist in Guild Wars.
Except for superheroes. Then I give them unsubtle superhero aliases like “Collateral Damage Man”.
I rip off the names various Forgotten Realms characters, stealing names like Xhalph, Jeggred, Nobanion, Savras, Lathander and so forth.
Most of my character names are Bo + class
Bomage
Bocleric
Borogue
but then I just started using BO as the starting point so now I also have
Bohemoth
Borlock
Boxershorts
Bomalicious
Bodhisatva
Borborygmi
a couple just have BO in the name somewhere
Someday I’m going to break from tradition and name all my toons after nuts
Pistachio
Cashew
Peanut
Macadamia
Hazelnut
Filbert
I’m on an obscure names of Egyptian mythology thing lately. All the good Greek ones were taken on my WoW server.
ETA: breaking into Mayan and Aztec lately though. My upcoming DK will get something unpronounceable in Nahuatl with a billion "x"s in it.
i hit the wow random name generator a thousand times until it comes up a name i can edit into something clever or cool. my undead death knight is ghastliar.
Considering I usually play damage dealers or tanks, I tend to go for suitable viking names:
Styrbjörn
Styrmir
Fleigir
Egill
Grettir
Or whatever else in Norse mythos that catches my fancy at the time.
A lot of the time I name them after the appropriate tabletop characters I’ve played - so I’ve had a Jesse, an Alferd, a Torin, a Kitsune… (Haven’t used Talia (although she, like Torin, Alf, and Kit has had a Soul Cal character based on her) due to it being difficult to find a CRPG in which naming a character after her would be appropriate (she’s winged…not usually allowed in CRPGs).
I haven’t played a superhero CRPG, yet, but if I did (I want to play CoX, but can’t afford it), they’d be based on and named after my characters from superhero games, or stories I’ve written.
I’ve been recycling the same names forever.
Baklava the Red (fighter-type)
Sizzler or Krakkadoom (mage)
Qua’lude Riker (everything else)
For Diablo II, I open up my D&D books and pick a name that I like. For WoW, I’ve just been using the random name generator.
I also do variations on my own name. My human priest in WoW is named Rikkanuthe.
I usually take one of three approaches:
(1) I pick a name from mythology, or popular fiction like Conan or Cuchulainn or Thor or Gandalf or whatever…
(2) I pick the name of a dinosaur that approximates the character/feel that I’m going for (Tyrannosaurus, Velociraptor, Stygimoloch, etc)
(3) I choose some ridiculous combination of words that makes me chuckle, like Nutpuncher (pronounced “Neu-poonshay”) or Gigglenuts. Of course if it’s a female character, I’d have to modify this to something like Giggletits. Still works for me.
I try to make what sort of sound like appropriate names for the cultures of my WoW characters. Right now, I have six characters running:
Lowwnor - Tauren Druid
Jalisse - Troll Priestess
Korezahn - Blood Elf Rogue
Castamir - Human Warrior
Orionais - Night Elf Hunter
Bozhemoira - Draenei Mage (Yes, this one has an element of joking)
Usually, I’ll try to do Slavic(ish) names for the Draenei, since the accents are Russian. I’ll usually try to use Victorian English names for Forsaken, since a lot of the NPC names are of that sort of era and place.
Then again, I’ve gone full-out joke, too. My lvl 61 Orc Shaman (on another server than the ones above) is named Khermut. It’s not easy being green. And I’ve had a Troll Frost Mage named Haagendasz.
For my alliance WoW characters the names are all related to women flyers, but I had to abbreviate most of the names.
Aviatrix
Pancho(barnes)
Jeannay(aeger)
Amelia(earhardt)
Hannar(eitsch)
A lot of my Horde characters start with “red”
Redwarmwind
Redcedar
Redfoxxy
With a few more continuing the color theme:
Gildagreen
Whitegold (a jeweler, natch)
And the Forsaken… “gloomy” might be the connection:
Nightlily
Nightiris
Crowheart
I think I have too many alts.
I usually play a female character, and that character is almost always named Pinky or Cupcake. Just to bug people, mostly my family.
I have a bunch of characters that I have played as D&D characters at one time or another… so they have actual back stories, personalities, everything else. I usually just pick a name from one of those that seems appropriate for the class/gender/time period of whatever game I’m playing. Never any joke names; just not my style.
A new name for every character. I usually play around with names from mediaeval northern Europe, old Norse, Sindarin or Arabic - or just make up syllables until it sounds right. I’m also strict about not referring to myself, the real world or previous characters unless they’re actually old characters being translated into the new system.
My male characters:
Jsor Aladis
Some permutation of Jragon (usually Jragonmiris, I’ve given up almost completely on that now since I’m more of an RPer and it was originally a cop-out on WC3 since I couldn’t register anything I wanted).
Xavier (it came from not being able to come up with a name for my monk in a D&D adventure, so we moved on without a name and everyone called him “X,” so I used Xavier).
Cleil - had nothing better
Ophielenis - Not sure, but it sounds elfy
Female:
Tyger (This usage predates me knowing anyone else on a ahem certain bored with something along the lines of Silver Tyger Girl as her name ;))
Sora - I probably got it form Digimon, but I don’t know.
Suion - No clue, I also like “S” a lot with females.
I’m creative but I generally like keeping character names the same as above, I only bother creating names when I’m naming NPCs for something.
My CRPG character vary widely in names, because I try to pick half-sensible names that fit the setting. Yes, I’m one of those people. When I played WoW, however, I deiceded to pick the smallest name I could so that it would be easier for others to type.
Thus was born Kallins (which is easy to type and was as short as I could find). When I played a much less crowded server of Everquest 2, I named by character Nips. I like playing sexy female characters, because I like looking at them. OK, it’s more because the male-version facial models in most games are hideously ugly, whereas they put more time into the females.
My Monks tend to be “Jahaziel”. I had a dictionary once that featured a section on Biblical names, it said “Jahaziel” meant “tower of God”.
I started naming all my Bards “Lute” a while back. “Skywatcher” was added some time later, I think for my first Neverwinter Nights character. I first started adding last names for my Dungeon Hack characters, last names tend to have some sort of connection to occupation (e.g.: a fighter named Marc Strongblade, a magic-user named Tasha Moonglow, etc.)
Games with a strong backstory, like Diablo II and LOTRO, get characters with names that aren’t out of line for that particular race. My names in Diablo II were based on names that I read in the manual.
For my Heroes and Villains in CoX, I start with a theme and try to work in a name from there, sometimes resorting to a language other than English. That’s how I ended up with an Electrical Blaster named “Phasenleitung” and an Electrical/Shield Brute named “Lo Dorato”. My latest is a Shield/Ice Tank named “Cerulean Cool”, a cop-turned-Hero. That wasn’t my first choice but all the others I could think of were already taken. This wasn’t and making him a former cop was obvious from there.
Something that drives my wife to fits is that my first character in any game is named “Doomed” simply because I know I’ll screw up the build or get bored and abandon the character before the game is over. So it’s really a self fulfilling prophecy on how s/he’ll do in the campaign. After that I tend to just use whatever the default name is.
In WOW however I have a bad tendency to use corny dual word combinations. Darkhold, Longstride, Searsong, Abysswalker, etc etc. I think you get the idea.