the_rck | (no subject)

Here's a crowd-sourceable thing-- For the game I'm running at UCon, I want all of the player characters to be playable as whatever gender the player prefers, but I also need to label the characters somehow. Names help with that.

The last couple of years, I've run games where I could just make up names, but this game is SF and set either in our solar system or in one colonized by folks from Earth. (Scott says I need to pull from The Expanse and/or Firefly.)

The characters are crew on a recently commissioned rescue ship, and I'm considering just labeling the characters by role and letting the players name them. I'm also considering just giving them family names, but then I have to decide ancestry/nationality and such, and I kind of feel like that should be up to the players, too, since it won't change anything I'm setting up (basically a space rescue with as many complications as it takes to fill the time. I'm making a list, and some of them will get more complicated the longer they're put off).

I could also use personal names that are gender neutral in the US or offer each person two somewhat similar personal name options, one US feminine and one US masculine. I used to do that when I wrote LARPs in the 90s, but I was also dealing with too many characters with complicated interrelationships for me to consider letting anyone go unnamed.

What do you all think?

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Yeah, personally when I run games at cons and hand out pregens, I only label them by the role or class/race combo or something like that, and let the players name them. I think having them name their own characters creates buy-in and investment in the character. I also like to have the players do a little more character building themselves upfront, not to take too much time but maybe letting them decide how they all know each other or something similar.

The Expanse was originally planned as a role-playing board game, before the idea was expanded (forgive the pun) into a novel series and now television series. The level of detail involved in the worldbuilding is fantastic.