Good character names are running out, huh?
By
Ad Astra,
Posted on: 2010-01-20 08:53 in CoH and CoV General Discussions
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It's hard to find a decent one. We're not a nation of meaningful names, which is to say our names have meanings that haven't been in the language for a thousand years. Picking a word from my language (even when I can transcribe it at all) makes me feels just... Odd to use it. In fact, I secretly snicker to myself every time I read Star Trek Online shortened to STO, because in my language that means "one hundred" and it's just funny in certain contexts.|
Originally Posted by Bloodspeaker
Also, color me a bit baffled... but what's wrong with a non-English name? Great conversation starters there.
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I HAVE, however, picked names out of the more interesting Slav and other Europen name pools, producing one Yaroslav Murumets, a combination of this guy and this guy. And it sounds cool
Pity my fellow countrymen suck at coming up with decent names.
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.
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Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow
OK, OK, this is a stupid reason to start a new thread, but... Well, when has that ever stopped me? You know, for the past five years I've been listening to the same tired old argument - all the good character names are already taken, woe is me. On the one hand, I don't buy that, because I know they're not, but on the other hand, there's always that niggling little thought at the back of my mind: "Yeah, I'm making fun of these people and dismissing their concerns, but what if it happens to me?"
What if it happens to me, indeed? Suppose there was a character I just HAD to give a descriptive name, where giving her two names or a personal name would just have been a step down? What if all the descriptive names I could come up with are taken? What if... Well, it finally happened. See, for a while now I've been throwing around a concept for a character who is blind (and deaf and lacks any sense of smell, taste or touch), but has alternate methods to see. "Daredevil" was out of the question, obviously, but I wanted to go with something that meant "blindness." "Blindness" itself wouldn't do, again very obviously, and I've tried both "nearsigted" and "shortsighted" before, and both were taken, as well as, let's be frank here, not being terribly good names. Being that English is not my first language and I hadn't dealt with blindness much before, that's where my synonyms ran out. What is one to do, then? I've seen a lot of people post thesaurus sites, but like an arrogant *****, I just ignored them, proudly thinking to myself "I would never need such a thing! My vocabulary is far too vast for me to worry about it!" Yeah, apparently not vast enough. But there's still the 'net, obviously, and doing something as simple as googling "blindness synonym" (and that's straight out of my search history) presented me with a couple of user-unfriendly dictionary sites that gave me such odd suggestions like "sightlessness" and "blindness" o.O. But among them were good suggestions, such as "myopia," which I never actually knew the meaning of, but it turns out to be a medical term for near-sightedness. "Cool!" I thought. "That... Sounds like a really crappy name, but maybe it's free!" Nope. No dice. Someone thought of it first, and perplexingly decided to use it. Huh. Well, people are typically smarter than me, and there are, like, a hundred thousand of them consuming, like, 30 names each, so they pretty much have to be. Moving down the list, I found the word "cecity," which is apparently SUCH a rare word for blindness that a google search for it reveals nothing and asks me if I actually meant "city" (it does show ONE sight that has it, though), and Wikipedia has no articles of that name, or with that word in their titles. Huh. Here I thought it was a word that meant some kind of specific blindness condition, or an eye disease of some sort, but apparently it literally means blindness in all sense of the word. Imagine that. Of course, before I did any of those additional searches, I tried the word as a character name. Surely someone smarter than me, with a better vocabulary and English as a native language would have thought of such a curious word and it would be taken. After all, all the obvious names are taken, a "blindness by another name" is very much as obvious as it gets. Nope. "This character name is available." Huh... I did not expect that, but I'll take it! So I sit around, making a character for around five minutes (I had the costume all planned out beforehand), get to the name selection field and type the name in. Just to be sure (and out of disbelief), I hit Check Name. "This name could not be checked." Son of a... Hit again, cannot be checked again. Why, I don't know, but I decided to give the name check system the finger and go ahead with it anyway. Name went through and the game popped me up into Outbreak. Still in disbelief, I checked to make sure I'd spelled the name right. My /infoself name field says "CECITY," that's C E C I T Y. Looks the same as what I'm seeing in my google serches. I can't copy my name off my infoscreen, so I do a /whoall (I'm the only one in Outbreak on Victory at the moment), copy my name out of there (in the process closing my chat window ARGH!!!), plop it down into google and I get a confirmation from The Free Dictionary explaining that my search term meant "(Medicine / Pathology) a rare word for blindness." Well, I guess I spelled it right, I'm in the game with the right name, it has the right meaning, and apparently either no-one thought of the name or no-one liked it. Huh... Finding the word to use as a name took me somewhere in the neighbourhood of 3-4 minutes, give or take. I've been typing up this post talking about it for the past 15-20 minutes. That ought to give you some context as to how hard it was to find. Good character names are running out, huh? |
The fact that people will see this name, and have no idea of what it means, really goes against what people REALLY mean, when they say there are no good names out there.
The name Striptease was taken. I found (and used Divest, which means to strip), alot of people don't seem to know that though. :P
NekoFuki (a name I normally wouldn't consider for a superhero) is my recent Plant/Thermal Troller...and most people don't know Fuki is Butterbur (a plant) in Japanese. I came up with it, because Fuki was taken.
In fact, with NekoFuki, I was told 1) It sounded suggestive 2) People have seen toons with the name Fuki in it, get genericed. :/
I've kept it anyways, but I put in the bio what Fuki means, just to hopefully curb that whole fiasco from happening.
Now...go tell me if names you'd actually see as a comicbook title are free.
Joybuzzer? Spoilsport? Checkmate? Nightwatch? Fiction? Ravage? Bliss?
And mind you, I use hyphens if I can get away with it. Fox-Girl, I was suprised not to be taken on Virtue.
Though I have a SG friend who used the name EagIe Boy. I was like "You know, Eagle-Boy, is free" and he was "I don't like to use hyphens" and I was "Spider-Man, uses a hyphen".
Hyphens like this are okay imo.
I don't mind the periods so much, when people are using the same name for their toons...
Dark Watcher
DarkWatcher
Dark-Watcher
Dark.Watcher
DarkWatcher.
...ect
You know when they are basically making the continuation of their toon (usually main).
But to just see the period on ones they don't have some for of the first three for instance, just bothers me :P
xxxNAMEHERExxx also...:/ N A M E H E R E...another sigh moment.
Just because you can do that, doesn't make the name good.
And I'll say it again. Read a superhero comic. Very seldom does the superhero use their real name. So, let's not go with that one :P
People want their comicbook sounding name. Everyone who starts these threads know it.
Names are limited. They're even more limited by the fact that Marvel & DC has decades on CoH :P
BrandX Future Staff Fighter
The BrandX Collection
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Well, sometimes I don't just restrict it to Latin or Greek combinations to come up with names. Recently I built a tribute character based on the old Gold Key, Magnus, Robot Fighter comics, which I loved when I was a kid in the 70s.*|
Originally Posted by Bloodspeaker
There's a gazillion people on the forums that'd throw suggestions at you. It's just a matter of planning ahead, coming here and saying "I have a character idea for X and Y powersets and Z backstory. Any name ideas?" Also, color me a bit baffled... but what's wrong with a non-English name? Great conversation starters there.
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Playing around with proper name origins and word origins allowed me, in a convoluted way, to convert "Magnus, Robot Fighter" to "Kalas Robanimrad." "Magnus" is Latin for "great" or "superior." "Kalas" is Swedish for the same. Robot is Czech. I changed "Figher" to "Hunter" then took that into Mesopotamia and the Old Testament to get "Nimrod." I then just ran the whole thing together, as if spoken very fast by humans of the distant future.
Ultimately, this gave me, Kalas Robanimrad, a martial artist of Earth's distant future, with mutant strength and invulnerability, trained by the his mentor, Unity Alpha, to battle evil synthetic lifeforms to protect and defend organic and good artificial life everywhere.
See? If you just think things through, unique names will suggest themselves.
But maybe to help folks out here, there should be a stickied post with a collection of ways to generate good, unique names for characters in this game?
* By the way, this tribute character doesn't look like ol' Maggie at all so, no risk of genericising.
"Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them."
I Just wanna add something, anyone who says
"all the good names are'nt taken, I just got "INSERT AWESOME* NAME"
Well... now a "good"* name IS taken, thanks a lot. :P
Does anyone use names in various ways?
Cause sometimes the name is very very important to my concept, and other times my character never ever uses it in any capacity, and thus it's a name I can just replace with something similar, but in the first instance, the entire character goes to pot if I don't have the name.
I'm getting the sense that many people making these arguments design character first, and name a far last, as opposed to at the beginning or somewhere in the middle, and thus don't get that some people might be without their perfect names* and get all miffed when they can't get it.
*the quality of them being subjective
Anyone Who wants to argue about my usual foolishness can find me here.
https://twitter.com/Premmytwit
I'll miss you all.
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Well, in a situation like that--and I'll agree that it's not a contrived one--I guess it sucks. If you start with the perfect name first before everything else, and sadly, it's a common concept and likely to be taken, well, that unavoidably sucks. Don't really have anything to suggest in this case aside from searching around for servers where it isn't taken already.
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Originally Posted by Premonitions
I'm getting the sense that many people making these arguments design character first, and name a far last, as opposed to at the beginning or somewhere in the middle, and thus don't get that some people might be without their perfect names* and get all miffed when they can't get it.
*the quality of them being subjective |
"Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them."
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If you start with a name that absolutely, positively cannot be changed, then you start with a name check, have it return a false and end before you really started. There is, however, nothing that can be done about this, as the premise behind choosing a name implies the act of choosing, and if you've already chosen, you deal with what you have. I've had a few that were like that, and some I've gotten, some I haven't. It is what it is.|
Originally Posted by synthozoic
Well, in a situation like that--and I'll agree that it's not a contrived one--I guess it sucks. If you start with the perfect name first before everything else, and sadly, it's a common concept and likely to be taken, well, that unavoidably sucks. Don't really have anything to suggest in this case aside from searching around for servers where it isn't taken already.
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Practically speaking, even a "set" name can be altered, however. Not by changing the name itself, but by changing how it appears, which part shows up, or if it includes a moniker or a callsign. I couldn't get Sam or Samuel, which is what my namesake character has only ever been called, so I threw in his completely irrelevant last name which I came up only for the sake of completeness. It's still his name, though.
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.
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Dr Von Goldfish is please.|
Originally Posted by Dr_Mechano
That is AWESOME!
I know one of the other players on union has a Dr von Goldfish. Tell me what image it conjures up in your head...go on...think about it... If you pictured a Goldfish in a bowl ontop of a robot body you'd be thinking the same thing as everyone else when they hear the name...instead he's a half man/half goldfish (like Captain Mako is half man/half shark) mad scientist. |
After the game having been out for such a long time, many of the good names have been taken, even the more obscure ones are being snatched away in the dead of night. I congratulate those who have grabbed their dream names, and wish those of you who're still looking good luck
Managed to get a few gems over the years though.. And most of them recent. Baked Potato for instance (Fire/Fire Scrapper) was a particularly fun choice to acquire, as everyone seems to make fun of the name, but you all wish you had it. Aswell as that I've got Brass Monday and Lazerate, all of which are on Union.
Few others without pics (I like showing off costumes, so shoot me) are a Martial Arts Scrapper called Storm Foot, evil magic char called Urith, eviler mutant called Spruk (Neither have a particular meaning I don't think, don't quote me on that), an Australian wizard called Underthrow and once had Salvager on Defiant, which I lost since transfering him to Union and having to rename them to Salvaged Abomination.
I am the Blaster, I have filled the role of Tank, Controller and Defender
Sometimes all at once.
Union EU player! Pip pip, tally ho, top hats and tea etc etc
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What's his battle cry? "My name is Potato!!!" ?
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Originally Posted by CBeet
Managed to get a few gems over the years though.. And most of them recent. Baked Potato for instance (Fire/Fire Scrapper) was a particularly fun choice to acquire, as everyone seems to make fun of the name, but you all wish you had it.
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So I should just give up because someone else got the name first? Screw that, I'll just throw some X's around it. It's the best option to gettnig the same name floating over my head, and I can just ignore the dashes as they're less signifigant than a wording change. More on this after the jump.|
Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow
If you start with a name that absolutely, positively cannot be changed, then you start with a name check, have it return a false and end before you really started. There is, however, nothing that can be done about this, as the premise behind choosing a name implies the act of choosing, and if you've already chosen, you deal with what you have. I've had a few that were like that, and some I've gotten, some I haven't. It is what it is.
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This is why a system that allows two people to have the same name works.
Your right to pick a name currently hinders mine because if you get it first, I can't have it. Whereas if we both have the same right, noone is disadvantaged. Excluding of course the people who want to be special snowflakes, and be the only one who has SUPERAWESOMENAME.They don't realize that's like forcing everyone in town to cut their hair short because you're the ONLY one who can have it long.
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| Practically speaking, even a "set" name can be altered, however. Not by changing the name itself, but by changing how it appears, which part shows up, or if it includes a moniker or a callsign. I couldn't get Sam or Samuel, which is what my namesake character has only ever been called, so I threw in his completely irrelevant last name which I came up only for the sake of completeness. It's still his name, though. |
Anyone who says that extra punctuation in the names and pertinent personal information floating above people's heads that they should not be seeing because that's not how the world works,"ruins their immersion" Has a whole 'nother problem they should be worrrying about.
Anyone Who wants to argue about my usual foolishness can find me here.
https://twitter.com/Premmytwit
I'll miss you all.
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Actually, we *DO* realize the implications and results of non-unique names. |
Originally Posted by Premonitions
This is why a system that allows two people to have the same name works.
Your right to pick a name currently hinders mine because if you get it first, I can't have it. Whereas if we both have the same right, noone is disadvantaged. Excluding of course the people who want to be special snowflakes, and be the only one who has SUPERAWESOMENAME.They don't realize that's like forcing everyone in town to cut their hair short because you're the ONLY one who can have it long. |
And we STILL think the idea sucks like a tornado.
Paragon City Search And Rescue
The Mentor Project
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Care to explain why, or do you just not like it?|
Originally Posted by Ironblade
Actually, we *DO* realize the implications and results of non-unique names.
And we STILL think the idea sucks like a tornado. |
Edit;
Tornadoes don't suck! they blow! did I just miss the joke?
Anyone Who wants to argue about my usual foolishness can find me here.
https://twitter.com/Premmytwit
I'll miss you all.
Great job Sam, you inspired me to change my signature yet again. 
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That's still changing the name, though. Specifically, changing the name from something that's an actual name to something that's a Counter-Strike clan tag. I don't have a problem with people doing that, of course, but I would never consider it.|
Originally Posted by Premonitions
So I should just give up because someone else got the name first? Screw that, I'll just throw some X's around it. It's the best option to gettnig the same name floating over my head, and I can just ignore the dashes as they're less signifigant than a wording change. More on this after the jump.
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| This is why a system that allows two people to have the same name works. |
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| This once again ties into the whole "How important is the name floating above your character's head to you" thing. If it does'nt matter at all, then sure, you might as well just throw up any old thing, you're not gonna actually use it in conversation, and don't acknowledge it's existence anyway. If it does, Like, say, it's a well known title you hold, that's a part of the jargon of the group you belong to, and the sub-group of that group you identify with, and that you(your character) picked for yourself, based upon your own personal likes and dislikes, that people are gonna call out to you, you're gonna want the one you picked and that is essential to the core of your character. If it's less important you can change it. |
To give you an example, you can go with The Hulk, The Incredible Hulk, Banner, Bruce Banner, Bruce, Dr. Banner or Dr. Bruce Banner. That's 7 names for the same Marvel character, all of them equally his, all of them equally appropriate, simply because he's known as Dr. Bruce Banner, aka the Incredible Hulk. Trying to suggest that picking one over the other is somehow not caring about it is absurd, because they are all things he is called and has been called in comic books and on comic book covers.
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| Tornadoes don't suck! they blow! did I just miss the joke? |
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.
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Originally Posted by Premonitions
Care to explain why, or do you just not like it?
Edit; Tornadoes don't suck! they blow! did I just miss the joke? |
I want people to be able to see a characters name and think its me right away. Big headed of me? Possibly. A name is the same as an outfit/style of play [etc], its a symbol of that player.
Sure it'ld be cool if there was two noob busters on the same server, but wouldnt that confuse people too?
*types /search*
*finds a player named noob buster*
*oh hey damz, fancy teaming up?*
*sorry you got the wrong person*
I dont know, i just like being recognised as being me by friends by my style
@Damz Find me on the global channel Union Chat. One of the best "chat channels" ingame!
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The wind blows. Tornadoes do, indeed, suck.|
Originally Posted by Premonitions
Tornadoes don't suck! they blow! did I just miss the joke?
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I should know. I was born and raised in Tornado Alley.
There I was between a rock and a hard place. Then I thought, "What am I doing on this side of the rock?"
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I think I've come up with a way to allow for non-unique naming, Sam.|
Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow
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Two ore more characters can have the same name, as long as they share the same global. So, not matter who you /tell /note, /ignore, it will be the same player. Confusion solved.
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The current naming system allows a name to appear once on each server.|
Originally Posted by Red Valkyrja
I think I've come up with a way to allow for non-unique naming, Sam.
Two ore more characters can have the same name, as long as they share the same global. So, not matter who you /tell /note, /ignore, it will be the same player. Confusion solved. |
So presently TheNameICantGet can be associated with my account on Virtue, but another player can have TheNameICantGet on Freedom.
I do have the same name on different servers in the game. You can only have the name on Hero or villain side as well - so I have have a MyCharacter on Heroside Virtue - I can't have a MyCharacter on Villain Virtue but I could have a MyCharacter on Freedom Villian (in which case I couldn't have a MyCharacter on Freedom Hero as well) - which, in fact, is the case for me.
Your fix would throw a monkey wrench into the system across the servers, but I understand the angle you are going for from a single server stand point.
Also, this does not help the naming issues that some players are having - it just allows a player to have their same-name across multiple characters. Which may clear up some new naming clutter, but will do nothing to change my other character names that are still unique across all my characters on any given server.
I'm still for a random name generator being built into the game. (I don't have a problem with getting new unique names. And I'm not talking about crazy ones either.) I've posted on this before so due to forum rules I'm really not supposed to repost the info all over again, but, to cut to the basics, there is enough that the game knows about the character from the character creation system that it could draw off information to use to create character names based on the features of the character that has been created and only list names that have not yet been taken. Players could either pick from this list of name or enter variants of their own (to see if they are taken or not).
Seems a win-win, but it would take development time.
We know the basics of the standard "hero naming" conventions;
power/adjective-gender identifier
color power/adjective-gender identifier
power/adjective/name-number
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Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow
To give you an example, you can go with The Hulk, The Incredible Hulk, Banner, Bruce Banner, Bruce, Dr. Banner or Dr. Bruce Banner. That's 7 names for the same Marvel character, all of them equally his, all of them equally appropriate, simply because he's known as Dr. Bruce Banner, aka the Incredible Hulk. Trying to suggest that picking one over the other is somehow not caring about it is absurd, because they are all things he is called and has been called in comic books and on comic book covers.
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We are playing a superhero game, but we have to keep in mind and respect the copyright of others especially as it can have an impact on our game. Marvel DID sue. DC could very well sue. The DEVs are actively trying to avoid getting sued over the use of copyrighted names so keep this in mind when creating characters.
It is not all right to use copyrighted/trademarked names in the game.
On this subject, the name of mythical/legendary beings can't be copyrighted/trademarked in the US (I don't know about other countries - aka even those that would have access to the NA servers). An example of this is Nike. Nike is the Greek goddess of Victory. Nike doesn't have a trade mark on Nike. Nike has a trademark on "the swoosh" logo. The same would go for Thor, Odin, Hercules, etc.
At the same time, naming a character Thor or making a "Thor" character that "looks like" Marvel's The Mighty Thor would be copyright/trademark infringement as you are in violation due to the visual intellectual property rights of Marvel and, therefore, it would be in violation of the EULA.
I do not think that Samuel_Tow intended to condone the use of variant names of licensed characters in the game. I am just making it clear that it isn't okay to do so.
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The name Hulk (for a superhero comicbookk hero) is good.|
Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow
To give you an example, you can go with The Hulk, The Incredible Hulk, Banner, Bruce Banner, Bruce, Dr. Banner or Dr. Bruce Banner. That's 7 names for the same Marvel character, all of them equally his, all of them equally appropriate, simply because he's known as Dr. Bruce Banner, aka the Incredible Hulk. Trying to suggest that picking one over the other is somehow not caring about it is absurd, because they are all things he is called and has been called in comic books and on comic book covers.
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Now imagine that comicbook cover, instead of HULK, it read's Dr. Bruce Banner.
Yeah, not the same effect.
And to keep repeating that it is, when you KNOW people are saying they want names that sound like TRADITIONAL COMICBOOK HEROES (and Villains)...so why do you keep saying take the other route?
You know that's not what they want. I personally don't mind either way. But saying take the name Helen Goldenstien, for a character name, because you can't have Foxfire. Is a stupid thing to say, or even suggest, when you know it goes against what comicbook heroes/villains are about.
And sorry, part of what they are about is fun/cool/awesom call sign/handle.
This isn't to say there aren't good ones left. I'm sure there are some really good ones that havent been taken/thought of yet. Problem there, is they might not fit the actual concept of said character.
BrandX Future Staff Fighter
The BrandX Collection
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Yeah, see this? This I can go with without a second thought. I'm aware of the technical difficulties of making it so, but let me put it like this - if I were put in a position where this had been implemented, I would have no reason to complain. It's mechanically sound, it's visually clean and it gives people more options. I seen no reason to argue against it.
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Originally Posted by Red Valkyrja
I think I've come up with a way to allow for non-unique naming, Sam.
Two ore more characters can have the same name, as long as they share the same global. So, not matter who you /tell /note, /ignore, it will be the same player. Confusion solved. |
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.
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And I never said that, either. I said to pick from one of the ways you WANT your character to be called. If you don't want your Kid Flash to be called Bart Allen, then simply do not call him that. I'm sure there are at least a few other things you can call him. The point is, even comic book characters can be called multiple things, like Superman being called the Man of Steel. Just try one of the alternate variants. It doesn't guarantee you'll get a hit, but you might.|
Originally Posted by BrandX
You know that's not what they want. I personally don't mind either way. But saying take the name Helen Goldenstien, for a character name, because you can't have Foxfire. Is a stupid thing to say, or even suggest, when you know it goes against what comicbook heroes/villains are about.
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I'm not saying "just use another name," and I'd really like people to stop misquoting me on this one. I'm saying that even if you HAVE to use a particular name, you still have at least a couple of decent variants that you can go off of. Any reasonably developed character has those. And, of course, there is the off chance that yours doesn't, but it goes back to the original point - if you absolutely positively must use one specific name and no variants can EVAR suffice not one iota... Then check it, find it's taken and throw your hands up, because you can't make that character.
And no, a non-unique naming system is not the solution until one such that's both clear and not fugly is invented.
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.
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I said that the ability to use callsigns or similar things hinges upon how important the name is to you, and depending on the degree of signifigance, it can be more or less to even impossible to do.| Did you even read what you quoted? Who ever said anything about not caring about names or not using them in conversation? I said use the same name, just use more of it. Or use a different part of the same name. Or use a callsign. ALL of that is still part of the same character. It's just a question of which of his multiple names you choose to address him. |
The annoying bit here is that one group is saying that there's a problem, and the opposing side is saying that there is no problem, just the people discussing it.
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Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow
And I never said that, either. I said to pick from one of the ways you WANT your character to be called. If you don't want your Kid Flash to be called Bart Allen, then simply do not call him that. I'm sure there are at least a few other things you can call him. The point is, even comic book characters can be called multiple things, like Superman being called the Man of Steel. Just try one of the alternate variants. It doesn't guarantee you'll get a hit, but you might.
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)This is, once again, a result of how important you consider the name floating above your head. If the fact that it's floating above your head means your character's name is well known, and thus the name floating above your head is funtionally important, then you want the name seen by others to be the name you go by, not one of your many other names.
If, like me, it varies for each character, putting punctuation in or some such can be a proper solution for the proper character.
If you consider it a part of your character's aesthetic, then you want the name to be constructed a certain way. If it's just a game mechanic forced on you, then you can go with whatever works.
Furthermore, if the name is "Baked in" making any changes to it might recquire you to change your character around, if that's the case, this MIGHT lead to some good results, but it could also be completely horrible.
One of the problems here is that the character creator enforces a certain creative process. :
Basic Concept>Powers>Look>Name>Backstory.
The changes made to the creator have fixed this a bit, but it's still there, and that does'nt exactly mesh with how many, or even most people create characters.
To continue the baking metaphor:
For people who make characters the way the game does, names are the "Icing" on the cake, the last thing you do to it.
For others, names are the eggs, powers are the flour (cause it rhymes
) Origin is the milk, Archetype is the sugar, and backstories are the other seasonings and spices. Changing any one of those leads to changing the entire cake, for better or worse.Quote:
| I'm not saying "just use another name," and I'd really like people to stop misquoting me on this one. I'm saying that even if you HAVE to use a particular name, you still have at least a couple of decent variants that you can go off of. Any reasonably developed character has those. |
[quote]And, of course, there is the off chance that yours doesn't, but it goes back to the original point - if you absolutely positively must use one specific name and no variants can EVAR suffice not one iota... Then check it, find it's taken and throw your hands up, because you can't make that character.
Quote:
| And no, a non-unique naming system is not the solution until one such that's both clear and not fugly is invented. |
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I think unique names is a plus to this game.
Quote:
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Originally Posted by Ironblade
Actually, we *DO* realize the implications and results of non-unique names.
And we STILL think the idea sucks like a tornado. |
Quote:
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Originally Posted by Premonitions
Care to explain why, or do you just not like it?
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Then there's the 'unique identifier' issue. Sure, there are 'workarounds' but it seems to me that whenever something is described as a 'workaround', it's a clumsy compromise rather than a clean and effective solution.
Also, I'm accustomed to it being the way it currently is. I'm not inherently averse to change, but (as I've noted) I think this would be a BAD change.
Quote:
| Tornadoes don't suck! they blow! did I just miss the joke? |
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