Here are some completely meta, non-power-affecting, house rules about player character names that I'm thinking about for future RPG campaigns I run.
One hard rule is going to be "no accent marks." I don't measure the exact amount of time I spend writing game recaps, but I suspect it's about 1/3 actual writing, 1/3 reviewing Roll20 logs for details I can't remember well enough to keep one of my players from pointing out an error later, and 1/3 putting the accent mark in Seépravir's name. So future names in games I run will be rendered with only plain ASCII characters. (Now, it's entirely possible that in the original Elvish or Dwarven or Chinese or Vilani or Klingon or whatever language the character's name comes from, the character's preferred spelling has accent marks or runes or emoji or heiroglyphics or non-Latin letters or space holograms. And that's totally fine. I'm just saying that when I render it into English for use at the mostly-English-speaking gaming table, I will stick to ASCII so I can type it faster.)
The corollary is that if your character has a long name, we will end up abbreviating it and using the short version most of the time. So players should put some thought into the short version of their name, that their companions will actually use most of the time. Maybe that's their full legal name; maybe it's just their nickname. They can write a longer version on their character sheet if they want. (Sometimes there's just no time to say "Look out, Helgevottir Hirgebottom, rocks are falling.") Note that this has real world parallels in groups like the military and hockey teams: it's just more convenient to have a short nickname when you need to yell orders or warnings quickly.
The final rule is "only one PC with the same first initial at the same time." Just because being able to refer to people with one letter is convenient. (For example, when maintaining a text box of active spells, being able to type "Flight: Z, P, G" is awesome.) Obviously this limits games to 26 characters at a time. Which is also a good rule. (I prefer 4 or 5, but 27 is right out.)
GURPS / Dungeon Fantasy RPG campaign set in Castle Whiterock megadungeon
Nice. When I saw the headline of the post, I feared your stance might be rather draconian, but I certainly agree. ASCII characters only for the write-ups. Hear hear.
ReplyDeleteOne of the former wizard PCs in my current DF game had a name so long that even the player couldn't remember it properly half the time. And the start of that name matched that of one of the DF pregens also in use at the same time. The PC ended up with the nickname "Fingers" from one of the other PCs. It stuck, and the wizard player didn't like at all. His new PC has much easier name. Coincidence? I think not :-)