What's in a name?

[hwango]

I mentioned at last night's gaming session my mad plan for character names these days. At some point in my role-playing career I noticed that I had an awful lot of character names that started with S or K. I decided that I should start paying more attention to that sort of thing, and now I always pick a starting letter that I haven't used yet. I've only got H, Q, W, and X to go, though H gets partial credit for having showed up in two surnames recently. I did something similar when I ran Exalted to make sure that I didn't end up with too many similar names, figuring that would make it more likely that players remembered the names of NPCs.

Comments

[fenris-lorsrai.livejournal.com]

I do something similar when running games. I also do them in order so I remember the order NPCs were introduced in. "ah-ha, they must have met Adam before Bob!"

[hwango.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I'm terrible at remembering stuff like when we met people or whether we visited place A before B or the other way around. To avoid confusion, or at least make it easier to undo confusion, I kept absurd amounts of notes when I ran Exalted. I had a timeline for when noteworthy things happened and how many days until something else would happen. I wrote a quick summary of each session after it ended that I mailed out the day before the next session to refresh people's memories.

...My god, I just went to look over the running chronicle of the campaign, and I can't believe that I started that game all the way back in May of 2002. This October will the the 4-year anniversay of the last session I ran. I feel incredibly old now.