where do YOU get inspiration from when you name a new character in World of Warcraft ? from a famous book or movie ? or simply your imagination ?

i pick from all three categories and sometimes i get great names, sometimes not.

Let me take the liberty of expanding this thread's scope beyond the successful MMO, I suspect not many people here are playing.

So, as far as general RPG (or not) naming character conventions are concerned, I am usually following to the list of principles below.

• Never take the existing name from a movie, book, character.
• No "DEVILDUDE" nicknames, only plausible sounding names.
• My own real name is used only for the first name only, never the last. Either Martyne or Mykyta. No difference for me there.
• The last is usually chosen depending own the world or the class, race or attributes of the character.
• Most of the time, I pick one from the generator, if available. If not I usually come with some kind of a name which I think will suit the gameworld.
• No funny stuff. A certain way to kill the mood of a scene is to have a character refer to you by some stupid joke-name.
• Not to look much into it. Jesus, it's only a name in a computer game.

The last one is the hardest to adhere to.

In single player RPGs I always use Vedder (or deriviations on that) for a male character or Celeste for female characters.

For pen & paper D&D I usually generate some random letters for inspiration and then adapt that to something that sounds nice and fluent and fits the character's race/class/personality.

And you were complaining about pretentious names? What's with all those "y" you're carrying? Do you know how hard are those to come by? =P

That was a joke. I have a French "e" at the end too, see? I love pretentious names! They're making me feel much more important than others with stupid, plainly written common names.

Seriously, though, I am called "Mykyta", according to my passport. Here's justification from wikipedia.

In the Ukrainian alphabet, the sound similar to Russian [ы] is denoted by [и], and the Russian sound [и] is denoted by [i]. The letter is usually Romanized in English and most other West-European languages as [y], e.g. Krylov (family name, Крылов).

So, my name is "Микита" in Ukranian. In Russian it sounds "Мыкыта". Romanized, it becomes Mykyta, through no foul play of mine.

Now if only there was a way to squeeze an "e" somewhere in it. ;-)

For offline games okay, but for online games it's basically an identity. And I can't really understand people naming their primary characters like Quad Core Extreme, Schadens Reduzierer (damage reduction) or X Kampf Gurke X (battle cucumber).

I usually name female characters Angel Fyne and male characters Keisuke Kusanagi. Kind of cheesy names, but works for me.

I forgot to add, in games where I have to name an entire party (such as Eye of the Beholder) I usually pick such fascinating names as "Fighty", "Pally", "Thievy", "Maggy" (Wizzy if it's a boy! :).

And the few times I tried a JPRG (which never lasted very long) It was usually AAAAA. Because I'm too lazy to move my cursor with a gamepad.

After my first serious go at a jRPG (with Final Fantasy VIII, I believe) I found myself reading reviews, articles, FAQs and forum discussions and not having a slightest idea who are people referring to, because I've changed all the default names. I still don't know what the characters are called apart from the Squall.

Since then, it's always default choice for me in jRPG.

You mean you guys have more than 1 name for your game characters? Yikes. Always used the same name for decades.

Here we have a party consisting of a male human warrior, a male elf ranger, a female half-elf cleric, a female dwarfen mage, and a male gnome thief. Their names are: Indra, Indra, Indra, Indra, and Indra.

:P

What's wrong with being severely narcist? :p

I don't do MMOs now, but the time I did, I used to just have stock names for certain character archetypes. You have no idea how many fighters I have had named "Tordek" (as in the D&D fighter mentioned in the 3rd edition players handbook).

but for actual tabletop games? that depends on the setting. I try my best to make sure my naming conventions fit the setting itself. So for one Arabian Nights -esque campaign my friend ran for a short time, I just used an Arabian name generator to get ideas, and cross it with a bit of research. (this is also one of the reasons why I LOVE pulp games since pulp names are general just a lot of fun)

of course, if I'm playing a game that is say, just with my friends, (i.e. playing diablo 2 with just my friends instead of playing on Bnet) I'll either use my real name so they know who the hell I am or some variant of it.