Who Is Ellen - 65 - HD
Added 2022-11-29 04:01:40 +0000 UTCMoving on with NO CONSEQUENCES!
Commentary
Don't introduce a Non-Player Character unless you have their name, physical description, stats, full backstory, and favorite color ready to go.
I'm mostly joking, but based on several games I've listened to, it might actually be a good idea to have a list of throwaway names in case someone suddenly gets really attached to a random NPC for whatever reason.
(Assuming you're not better at names than I am. To the surprise of no one, I'm terrible with names.)
Comments
When my great-grandparents came to this country, they shortened the Yiddish "Finklestein" to "Fink" to sound more American. Of course, they based this on having been in America for a couple of hours. (They made the change at Ellis Island.)
Carl Fink
2022-12-01 03:40:30 +0000 UTCvery suspicious
Jere
2022-12-01 02:08:23 +0000 UTCI rather like Nrert as a name, really. And Neil Diamondew; that's great.
Brooks Moses
2022-11-30 23:24:34 +0000 UTCShould play that one to the hilt then. Give him SHOCKINGLY red hair; he has a nickname, but won't tell you what it is. He has a bad German accent, and the surname "Ring" - but is only ever referred to as "Mr Ring" - if he has a first name, he won't disclose that either. He has a scar running over one eye (the eye itself appears fine, although he is occasionally seen to squint suspiciously at people using ONLY that eye.) he carries a cane; the head of the cane is roughly round, but whenever you try to make out WHAT it is, you can't quite recognize it. He covers the head of the cane with one hand at pretty much all times, and if he puts it down, you can't seem to see where. Whenever you go someplace suspicious, he is there. Whenever you talk to someone suspicious, they know him by name, and occasionally greet him walking by. He is painfully conspicuous, given the red hair and scar, so its hard to miss him. He will claim to be retired, but won't say from what. Anything else, you can make up on the fly and just add to his character sheet for consistency. For advanced usage, there are actually THREE of him, never seen together, and everyone but the players can tell them apart despite them being visually distinctive yet not from each other. The three have had wildly different careers and hence have wildly different skillsets, but won't talk about their history either - now they are retired they have "put all that behind them"
David Howe
2022-11-30 22:25:24 +0000 UTCLarry is going to be like Fred constantly chasing after Red Herring all the time, isn't he.
Daryl Sawyer
2022-11-30 21:58:18 +0000 UTCI believe it may have something to do with how much fun the GM or the players seems to have with the NPC's accent or speech. I recall one of my brother's NPCs, who was exceedingly grimy and had an exceedingly thick accent, and he especially delighted with having her mispronounce platinum in the same fashion that I had the first time I had attempted to say the word, having never heard it pronounced. To be fair, our other brother had then taken my attempt as the correct way to pronounce the word, so it was pronounced improperly quite a bit before we learned better. But my brother's NPC was created after we learned better. I think it was something like about an hour after we learned better. I think he probably had spent most of that time mulling over how to build an entire accent around that mispronunciation. She seemed like she was supposed to be a throw-away NPC, but she moved on to become one of the most important NPCs, story wise, in that campaign.
Some Ed
2022-11-30 04:10:29 +0000 UTCI also have a German surname, and people do fine with it. As with most surnames, it's not too long, so it's fine. People usually only tend to prefer a name like German or Poland when their original surname doesn't fit in a 30 character surname field. However, Germany and Poland are among the countries where names that long, while not exactly common, are less unheard of than most other countries.
Some Ed
2022-11-30 04:00:08 +0000 UTCDoesn’t help when you use the same mini/token because you grabbed it at random.
Thisguy
2022-11-30 00:02:35 +0000 UTCDetailed NPC with a rich backstory that's integral to the adventure that you spent weeks writing up. PCs: "Eh, they're probably not important." A random drunk hobo that you threw in for background flavor. PCs: "This person must be the most important person in the world and we shall spend the next hour finding out what they know!"
KC
2022-11-29 21:15:19 +0000 UTCThere would be clear indication if it were everyone.
Dan Shive
2022-11-29 15:29:46 +0000 UTCDepends. Do you consider it bad that you think like a suspicious D&D player?
Thisguy
2022-11-29 11:44:07 +0000 UTCI have a German last name... it's only 9 characters. Or 8 the way most people misspell it :)
Copper Hamster
2022-11-29 09:01:59 +0000 UTCIs it bad that the first thing I thought of while reading panel one was "ooooh... so the mayor has a **cleric** friend who **just happens** to visit him on the day his **magical chicken** was abducted to perform some **satanist ritual** ? wink wink ?"
Rémy
2022-11-29 08:42:16 +0000 UTCThis is why you just have a bunch of healing potions.
Thisguy
2022-11-29 06:56:08 +0000 UTCThere's a reason I have a few baby name sites in my bookmarks list, yes. "Hmm, I want a Celtic-sounding name for a female warrior character... *checks site* Finley is the modern Scottish version of Fionnlagh, which is 'Fair (as in blonde) Warrior' in Gaelic. That works."
Jenora Feuer
2022-11-29 06:05:10 +0000 UTCI would assume what Dan means is that they have an aversion to naming characters, such that they put off naming characters sometimes until after said characters have been introduced. Like, say, Dr. Germahn, who oddly enough reminds me of the Mr. Poland from my high school. Mr. Poland was born in Poland, but his family moved to when he was quite young and he grew up in the US. Their surname on all of their US documentation was always `Poland`, with no reference to what it may have been before. He wondered about what his family's last name was before their Ellis Island special for most of his childhood. When asked about it, his parents would only assert that it was better now, and that he didn't need to worry about it. "Our new name is a lot easier to write on forms." Then, when he turned 18, he asked his father about what their name was before they emigrated to the states. This time, his father actually told him. Upon finding out, he decided to not change his name back to that after all. I've heard that sort of story is more common for people of Polish descent, but still happens to people of German descent. Only one of the Mr. Germans I have met turned out to have been distant members of a certain someone's extended family; everyone else has had very long, very German run on names that in general would not fit on US name forms. I mean, statistically speaking, I haven't met that many people with a surname of German, I shouldn't have met *any* who were part of that particular family. For all I know, I really didn't and I just happened to meet someone who felt like making a particular unverifiable claim knowing that I was someone who disliked a certain amount of my own family and also probably someone he'd never meet again.
Some Ed
2022-11-29 05:52:07 +0000 UTCI tried the website to generate an elf name, and got "Oncith Gregella". Then I went to https://kevan.org/games/randomletter, which randomly selects scrabble tiles, and got "Nrert Sagnshet". With a little cleanup (e.g. "Naret Sangshet"), the random scrabble tiles look like most D&D character names I've seen. Personally, I prefer to use familiar first names, and old-timey last names similar to "Erik the Red" and "Alan-A-Dale". They're easier to remember. (I once had a half-elf bard named "Neil Diamondew", but most people were too young to get the reference.)
Dan Merget
2022-11-29 04:53:47 +0000 UTCRecommendation: Ellen should under no circumstances have other NPCs deny the existence of this convenience character. There's basically no better way than that to steer the PCs to following the cleric as their primary lead to the mystery. Something I only learned belatedly one campaign after accidentally derailing my own campaign because the group had *asked* to play with a crits table and then encountered said crits table unexpectedly early because some nitwit decided he wanted to roll for a completely optional pre-adventure thing. Eventually, though, I realized I needed to put in bread crumbs back to the intended adventure, so the convenience cleric ended up having been from the keep of the big bad the whole time. To be clear, my situation was a little different, as only one member of my player's party was affected by their fumble. However, it had been needed because they didn't have any healing in their party - something that was a problem that really should have been fixed. In fact, I had the convenience cleric offer to fill that roll, but they turned them down. I probably wouldn't have wiped them out of existence after that, but I hadn't really been thinking about it too much. I just filed it away in the same metaphorical round paper file with the rest of the pre-game banter, so the next day when the players needed a healer and went looking for said cleric, I'd forgotten about them completely. By the way, a group should not be asking to play with a crits table if they don't have a healer in their group. Our group was only looking at a single side of that equation, as a multiplier for the damage that they dealt. Unfortunately, that table was accessed at two ends of the D20. Normally, I wouldn't have applied a failure crit to a non-combat roll, but they were specifically looking to try out the table and that was early on in my GM career, and that was the campaign in which I learned that rule.
Some Ed
2022-11-29 04:46:43 +0000 UTCGiven the ellipses, I'd guess all Larry. A linking 'bubble' between each might make that more clear, but... I'm not a comicologist.
David Fenger
2022-11-29 04:46:08 +0000 UTCBy "terrible with names," I assume you mean in remembering, not assigning. Your characters don't have bad names.
Stephen Gilberg
2022-11-29 04:34:09 +0000 UTCAre the thought bubbles all meant to be Larry's, or are they for all the players?
Violet Moon
2022-11-29 04:28:58 +0000 UTCThere is a website (https://www.fantasynamegenerators.com/) that generates fantasy names, including lists for stuff like Elves or Dragonborn or the like, plus countries and cities and a host of other things. Very handy for these situations!
David Sevier
2022-11-29 04:09:07 +0000 UTC
