Multi-Character Naming Conventions?

I've been thinking that I would use variations of my screen name "Aldemarran" for my various toons. (Al Demarran, Ald Emarran, Aldemar Ran, etc.) In WoW I found it convenient to be recognizable to anyone I met. However, with the emphasis shifting to storyline, I find myself questioning whether I want to tie down my character names or open up the creativity font.

So my question is this; what are your perspectives on naming conventions vs. free-form naming for a single player's toons?

P.S. I'm flying home in a couple hours so I should start being more active again, hence my opening this topic.

The name I give my characters, generally, are connected in some way to my characters' class, race, appearance ect. For example, I may use Learned Hand for my Sage or I may save it for my Shadow (who would then be known as "the Invisible" Learned Hand). Another character will be Godric Barbarossa who has a reddish-blonde beard. Barbarossa being the Italian appellation for a king of the Holy Roman Empire that means red beard. If you haven't noticed I also like to use names that are esoteric references. But I'm an RPer at heart so I may be an outlier.

My main character is Xavier James Dragen. Xavier is my paternal grandfather's middle name, while James is my maternal grandfather's middle name. They were cool cats in life, so I like to honor them. Why don't I use their first names? Well, Francis John just wouldn't sound as cool

Also, The initials XJ are like the XJ X-Wing series fighter from the New Republic Era. Vague Star Wars reference FTW.

As far as what you're doing, I have no problem with that. It's when you get into fools who use X1LukeSkywaler0 that annoy the crap out of me. Hopefully, their naming filters will block that crap.

Thanks for the comments!

The only problem my friends have had so far is that they can never remember which character is which. For example when they are sending mail they have trouble remembering whether my alchemist is Aldemar Ran or Aldem Arran or...

The trade off was that if I encountered people multiple times while running dungeons they would start to recognize me no matter which alt I was on. I had hoped this would help lead towards meeting communities. Unfortunately WoW's implementation of cross-server dungeons makes meeting the same person twice relatively unlikely at my current playtime levels. (I'm not trying to WoW bash here. To give credit where its due I can now get more dungeon groups in an evening that I used to be able to pull together in a week.)

I had a friend who had all 10 classes to 80 who mentioned he wished he'd used a recognizable set of names to make things easier. That was what lead me to start using a convention.

I guess I'll give the creativity factor more thought and see what happens. Thanks for all your comments!

A possible solution would be to use different first names and the same last name. For example you could have Godric Aldemarran and Xavier Aldermann. It would be easier for friends/guildies to remember Godric is your Artificer and X is your Biochemist.

I would have to rework some of the names I have thought of but I may do this myself. Though I'd have to find a last name I find equally suitable for several different species.

Godric_Barbarosa wrote:

A possible solution would be to use different first names and the same last name. For example you could have Godric Aldemarran and Xavier Aldermann. It would be easier for friends/guildies to remember Godric is your Artificer and X is your Biochemist.

I would have to rework some of the names I have thought of but I may do this myself. Though I'd have to find a last name I find equally suitable for several different species.

Has it been confirmed that we get surnames? If it has I missed that part

Hmm, Interesting. In older MMO's the name can only be used once. I/E Last name or surname...Hope that is true. I've been working on the geneology of my Republic side toon as a distant ancestor of my SWG Unlocked Jedi toon.

< Interesting, this will be...

Mongo wrote:

Has it been confirmed that we get surnames? If it has I missed that part

It has not been officially confirmed but it was mentioned in an unofficial and NDA breaking release that I will not repost here because I don't want to get this forum/group on the wrong side of Bioware. It was posted here earlier in another thread but the link in the post has since been deleted.

Aldemarran wrote:

The trade off was that if I encountered people multiple times while running dungeons they would start to recognize me no matter which alt I was on. I had hoped this would help lead towards meeting communities. Unfortunately WoW's implementation of cross-server dungeons makes meeting the same person twice relatively unlikely at my current playtime levels. (I'm not trying to WoW bash here. To give credit where its due I can now get more dungeon groups in an evening that I used to be able to pull together in a week.)!

I know a guy in WAR who did this, his toons where Omar, Omarshariff, Shariff and a few other versions, that's not you is it?

Xavier wrote:

... I know a guy in WAR who did this, his toons where Omar, Omarshariff, Shariff and a few other versions, that's not you is it?

Hehe, no.

I only played WAR very briefly and the only name of any interest I had there was a Gobo with something like "Aiyaiowieouch". Aldemarran was my first 60 in WoW, but I switched to a convention when I started playing on Shadow Council. TBH I'm avoiding tossing that convention into a wide open public forum like this. (I'm probably paranoid, nonetheless...) But I'd be willing to PM it if you're that interested.

In WoW I had a whole bunch of RP alts that belong to the same family. Like I often played the father, mother and sister of my main char etc. So people who used RP addons that allowed a surname would know me by that. Or even the ones who didn't use any knew em if they had read my background.

Then on the other hand I had my get away chars that were not part of the family. Kept most of them secret so I could play without constant ingame tell spam.

Naming in general.. well I usually make a new name entirely per character or use something I used in some other game with few alterations perhaps. It varies from case to case tbh

IIRC the last I used Raf was in SWG as an alt.

That sounds pretty cool RX The "TOR-Brady Bunch" if you will...hehe.