Misdirected Mark Forums

https://knighterrantjr.blogspot.com/201 ... names.html

After some discussions on social media last week, I wrote up an article looking at naming conventions as a means of conveying setting details.

A convention in naming that I like a lot is where you don't keep your name your whole life. We see this to a limited extent when a childhood friend goes from Katie to Kate. Some cultures are more extreme. A co-worker I knew years ago moved from the middle East to the US and his father changed his name to signify a new phase of his life.

Another convention that's interesting is when the community names you. I encountered this in the ASL community. My name Emmett doesn't fit their naming conventions so they gave me a descriptive name, my "sign name"

Good post! I don't think nearly as much about what character names communicate as I do location names. (Which is what I thought this post would be about, haha. )

Emmett wrote: ↑Wed Sep 11, 2019 12:22 pm A convention in naming that I like a lot is where you don't keep your name your whole life. We see this to a limited extent when a childhood friend goes from Katie to Kate. Some cultures are more extreme. A co-worker I knew years ago moved from the middle East to the US and his father changed his name to signify a new phase of his life.

Another convention that's interesting is when the community names you. I encountered this in the ASL community. My name Emmett doesn't fit their naming conventions so they gave me a descriptive name, my "sign name"

Emergent naming conventions. That is very cool.

RobAbrazado wrote: ↑Wed Sep 11, 2019 3:56 pm Good post! I don't think nearly as much about what character names communicate as I do location names. (Which is what I thought this post would be about, haha. )

Thanks, Rob. The biggest issue I have with place names is when I'm trying to come up with planets in Star Wars games.

To the blog post, fitting names are something that happens in real life too. For example there's a statistical bump in the number of dentists named Denis. In general this happens in a lot of professions. There's also a statistical bump in people with the same letter in their first names getting married.

All a bit strange when you think about our names as a label placed on us by our parents that don't know us yet. Then again, my son is so much like me and my daughter so much like my wife that it's almost like naming them is a wish for a second life traveling in a new direction.

In a playtest, a player pointed out that I used one naming convention in the introductory setting text and then an entirely different one once the game began. OOPS!

It was super obvious as something that needed changing but I didn't see it on my own. Consistency is important. Both naming convention were doing things to establish setting and play experience but they weren't working together.