Naming conventions: lighten up

[Hollow_Mage]

Hi, this one is for the DM team!

Hey, long time fan of NWN here. Seems to me that the server rules around Names are a little vague when it comes to Titles in names. That is to say, there's more room for intrepretation when something is "discouraged" from when it's banned. Let's take last night for example:

A couple of DMs (I know who but why make trouble with names?) were busy between invasions and quests and had to deal with a buddy of mine. He's been looking forward to the RP here for a while, since I've told him stories of the server and what can happen here when people are on their game. When they found him, he was reporting a hostile NPC questgiver. The DMs asked him about his name, which was Boss.

They asked him to change it, he asked them to change it for him, they told him to remake the character, he remade the character, and then found that he couldn't get past the intro anymore so he decided just to quit. As someone who was sincerely looking forward to introducing my friend to a server I've played for nearly a decade, that was disappointing.

I fundamentally agree with the principle that the name above a character's head needs to be in-character, both for immersion and for script compatability! A lot of the hard work that has gone into EfU's iterations uses the Player's name as a reference value (sp?), so if the character's name is wildly OOC, it really takes away from the whole endeavour.

Boss is a title. It could also be a name. It's up to interpretation is what I'm saying. This isn't King Bresley or Lord Voldenope, it's just Boss. Heck, people name their dogs King, and there's a guy walking around named Rex in a setting where latin is often used as a lexiconic surrogate for ancient languages like Netherese. And to be fair, I walked around the original Underdark with a name two characters shorter than that and nobody asked me to leave.

So my suggestion is to revisit the server rule around naming, how you word it, and how you enforce it. Specifically, I know you all have Leto, so there's not much of an excuse to force someone else to waste their time remaking a character around your personal interpretations.

[Silvermoon_Dervish]

The clerk you mentioned has a sad history of getting killed when there are troubles in the Square, don't take it personally. :)

[Hollow_Mage]

That's fair, it's a busy spot, at least in terms of population density.

[Halfbrood]

First of all, welcome back to the server.

So, the rule in question is a relatively minor one:

"You must select a name for your character that makes sense for the setting, and is not directly copied from a well known fictional or real life person. Including titles or honorifics in the character name is discouraged."

With this, I agree that interpretations can differ between DMs and players and perhaps 'Boss' is on the line, but honestly I don't think its particularly unreasonable for server staff to ask someone to make a fairly quick and easy change on a newly created character...

I don't really want to get into a massive drawn out discussion about naming conventions because it's really not why anyone is here...

But a couple of things -

LETO as you mentioned is really not as straight forward as you might think and probably would have taken triple the time it took for your friend the remake the character and come back in again.

Secondly, your friend did remake the character with a particularly (although amusing) obtuse name as a joke so really, doesn't seem like time is much of an issue here so the point is kind of moot...

In all, I'm sure we'll all in the DM team be more thoughtful about approaching asking someone to change a name in future.

As for the issue with the NPC that died during a server event - again, please don't have your friend think that was some personal vendetta against him in particular because that's entirely not true. As has been mentioned, that NPC tends to die quite a lot...

Again, welcome back and have fun. Your friends (and everyone elses) are entirely welcome to return here and play at what is a particularly exciting time in the server's timeline...