Jandau said:
I request there be a law against linking to TV Tropes. That little detour when checking out "Luke Nounverber" cost me two hours of my life...
You too? Whats WITH that site?
Anyways, I know people with a few good naming rules that rarely lead us astray. One person always names characters after Dostoevsky characters, and they always sound good. My personal favorite is to find chemical additives in junk foods, and use those. Seems weird, but it yielded me both Ascorbic and Carageenen, not to mention my new favorite character name, Tocopheryl. Another good rule of thumb is to make characters who are easy to give logical nicknames to. Tocopheryl, for example, gets shortened to Toco, or Taco for the laughs. Makes communication a lot easier.
The most overlooked names are the ones which would be unusual on a real life child, but not unusual enough to get child services called on you. I am partial to the names, "Nayada" and, "Maries", mainly because they are a bit unusual, but still pretty down to earth, and therefore easy to remember. "Bob" is a bit too mundane, sure, but fairly normal names are too often overlooked.
Of course, the easiest thing to do is to have a bunch of good, simple names with lots of variations possible. I use the name, "Thanas" sometimes. It's been extended into, "Thynas" before, and you can pretty much mix and match the vowels for many effective names.
Also, I think that joke names can be okay, but they have to give the option of suspended disbelief. If you need to think about it to figure out a joke, but you can convince yourself its a funny coincidence, the name will be funny, but not look silly at max level. For example, In DDO, I want the name, "Greaseis". Pronounced the logical GREE-sis, it sounds like a fine name. But look at the last name, "Apartybuff", and the joke sinks in. It's a little silly, but you can sill just fall back on, "GREE-sis" as a real sounding name. Blatantly mentioning a funny thing isn't very funny, but hiding it behind a legitimate sounding name is.
