Where'd your forum name come from?

[Corporea 20685]

This is fun! I was a sculpture/biology double-major in college, so I wanted something that sounded body-like. Corporea was my female version of corporeal. Plus, it was less likely to be taken already.

[ttuckerman 9205]

After about thirty years on forums I got tired of thinking of cute nicknames. So about ten years ago I just started to use first initial last name. My avatar is a picture of me 60 years ago. I used it on another forum that deals with a western game that I GM at conventions. I used it here after the Bones campain.

[Inarah 41726]

Mine is the name of a fictional character I created in high school, back when I still believed I could write epic sci-fi . It's been a handle of mine off and on for 30 years.

 

And here you thought it was from some tv show.

[Girot 8280]

Girot is the name of the main character of the first book I ever tried writing. I didn't formally adolt the name though until after my son was born.

[Ishil 30]

There sure are a lot of RPG characters here! Me too.

 

In a critical imagination failure, I chose the only name I could think of, that of a D&D character I'd created. I've never even played it.

 

Ishil

[Vahi5 8]

So I wound up with a goblin pacifist trying to figure out the meaning of life, good and evil, and all the while being persecuted by friend and foe alike until he at last began to acquire true wisdom the hard way. He faltered a lot, and made some mistakes, but he figured it out.

 

And then he died randomly when a wizard exploded. 3 years of work lost to a cookie-cutter wild mage.

 

Of further note, my current online store account is my second one. My first got disappeared in the couple of years I didn't use it and I had to make a new one. So now I get packages to my real name - but prior to that my packages, for some reason, came addressed to Buglips.

 

Wow. If I had such a great character and lost it when a party member exploded, I'd have probably given whoever played the exploding wizard a good punch in the shoulder. That's just a terrible way for a charcter to go out.

 

However, your packages being adressed to you as Buglips is quite possibly the coolest thing I've heard/read all year.

[Colonel Kane 6597]

Colonel Kane has several meanings. When I was thinking of a forum name I was reading a book on World War 2. There was a gentlemen in the Arny Air Corp that commanded the 98th Bombardment group named Colonel Kane. I also thought of the Commander Kane from the original Battle Star show. SO I created Colonel Kane. He has since been the main character in a story I wrote. He is the persona I wrap around myself when I'm at the game table. That's pretty much it in a nutshell.

[Pingo 109314]

Mine is Latin, means "I paint," which is basically my profession as well as my hobby.

 

Up until very recently I only ever registered under my real name, saw no point in anonymity. Then I ran into some self-published young-adult authors on Goodreads who were, well, kind of scary, and their stalkerish qualities (towards minor family members of people who they got mad at, no less) got me thinking harder about some of the virtues of internet anonymity.

 

Then the first internet gaming community I ran across turned out to be über-macho and casually misogynist. I suppose the fellas there would be shocked to hear it, since they seemed oblivious to the extraordinary offensiveness of what they were saying and the attitudes they were expressing. Anyhow, it seemed prudent to have a noncommittal username and to be careful to not breathe a hint of my actual gender, since it seemed clear that on that site "females" were not treated the same as "normal people".

 

When I first came to the Reaper forums, I was still a little skittish about that. I picked my username from my old college Latin dictionary, not realizing until after I had registered that it sounded, well, a little goofy in English. Oh, well. I was going to ask the second day that it be changed to "Pictor," then decided what the heck. The people on the Reaper forums have turned out to be way friendlier and more aware, anyhow, so I quickly relaxed and stopped trying to excise all reference to my gender, parental status, etc.

 

I'm still "in the closet" on that other forum, though.

 

My name is extremely unusual. My first name is very rare outside of Italy (No, I'm not Italian. My parents were neo-classicists.) and my last is a slightly unusual spelling of a familiar Irish name. Growing up, no one who saw my first name before hearing it ever pronounced it right and no one who heard it first ever spelled it right. It's not tricky, but it has double letters in a place where people don't expect them and it seems to throw everybody off. It's taken me years to develop a quick patter to explain the spelling to bewildered people seeing it for the first time.

 

I have only ever found one other person with the same name, so I can't easily be anonymous on the internet.

 

I was in the SCA, briefly, using my actual first name because it was exotic and Renaissancy. I also had a Shadowrun character called "Citrine", a spy for Tir Tangir. It hadn't actually occurred to me to use one of my rpg character's names. That's clever, and I wish I had thought of it.

 

EDIT: Oh, and my middle name? An accurate transliteration of an ancient Greek name which is normally anglicized rather differently and pronounced more simply. Neo-classists, I'm tellin' ya.

Edited December 31, 2012 by Pingo

[klawzie 752]

Yep - roleplaying character here too. xD

 

The first proper roleplaying group I ever joined was a SWAT Kats: The Radical Squadron chatroom based game. For those not in the know, SWAT Kats is an action cartoon where the characters are all 'kats', that is cat-people, living in a literal megalopolis called Megakat City. The city's policing unit is called the Enforcers, and two Enforcers were flying around the city in their jet and ended up crashing it into the Enforcer HQ. Their commander freaked out and told them they lost their badges, so they're like, "Fine, we quit." and the commander replied that, no, they can't quit, they have to pay off their debt for destroying the jet and the HQ so he put them to work in a junkyard. As they took on their new life, they realized they could build their own jet out of the scrap - and did and took to fighting crime as the SWAT Kats - T-Bone and Razor. Had all the best parts of sci-fi, superheroes, fantasy, time travel/alternate dimensions, pulp monsters, etc.

 

So I created a fan character, an actress (specializing in action/martial arts movies) who wanted to join the Enforcers but for reasons wasn't able to. So she became a vigilante called Klawz.

 

Over time, it became necessary for the players to be able to address me as a person apart from my character (up to that point, I was "Klawz-mun", a nickname everyone got based on their character's name, plus the suffix 'mun' as in 'human' or 'mundane' or something - I've rarely seen any other group use the term 'mun'), and as a friend prone to cute-ifying names called me "Klawzie", it stuck. I use it pretty much everywhere and though I don't think I've played Klawz in about ten years (I'm not even sure how much I identify with her anymore), I still like the handle.

 

And, since people mention it - yes, my real name is very unusual. To the point where even the surname is the less common spelling, the first name is generally heard only in Europe, and my middle name is the boy's spelling of it and also not usual in the US (at least, not as the boy's name). So I go by "Chella" (pronounced Shell-la, not like cello) though the name I'll be publishing under is "C. R. Reaves" (looks like a proper fantasy author's name, yes?). No real point in me obscuring my name much, as many of the sites I signed up for when I was younger insisted on some version of your real name and it never occurred to me to use a false one. But I never use my full real name. I have had stalking problems in the past. I'm a bit concerned the number of us ladies here who have.

Edited December 31, 2012 by klawzie

[Citrine 17646]

I am Norwegian, and have a Norwegian first name, and my American husband's anglicized german last name. This makes my first name/surname combo unique, like many of the other posters, which is why I don't use it online. And Americans just cannot roll those Rs, lol, so no one here ever says my name right. When I search for my real name on the net, I get my Master's Thesis, which is kinda neat.

[redambrosia 78348]

Tired of seeing the 2nd Edition Humanoids Handbook get abused by unimaginative players (cycling through minotaur fighters and kobold thieves doesn't count as creativity)

 

While I haven't yet had a minotuar of any sort, I have had a kobold... specialty priestess of Bahamut (note that in my husband's world specialty priests of Bahamut are paladins...). I've also had a beastwoman warrior, a wemic pyromancer, and a pixie priestess of Hanali Celandil (who was also the one who taught my kolbold how to be a priest).

 

What I haven't had thus far is a human character, because as my hubby says, why would you want to play a human, we ARE them and it's fairly boring!

 

And then he died randomly when a wizard exploded. 3 years of work lost to a cookie-cutter wild mage.

 

That's really sad. And it makes me glad that there are no wild mage characters in our group. I had to have wild mages explained to me, and I really don't get why you'd want to play, seem like a giant pain in the tush.

[buglips*the*goblin 93771]

 

So I wound up with a goblin pacifist trying to figure out the meaning of life, good and evil, and all the while being persecuted by friend and foe alike until he at last began to acquire true wisdom the hard way. He faltered a lot, and made some mistakes, but he figured it out.

 

And then he died randomly when a wizard exploded. 3 years of work lost to a cookie-cutter wild mage.

 

Of further note, my current online store account is my second one. My first got disappeared in the couple of years I didn't use it and I had to make a new one. So now I get packages to my real name - but prior to that my packages, for some reason, came addressed to Buglips.

Wow. If I had such a great character and lost it when a party member exploded, I'd have probably given whoever played the exploding wizard a good punch in the shoulder. That's just a terrible way for a charcter to go out.

 

However, your packages being adressed to you as Buglips is quite possibly the coolest thing I've heard/read all year.

 

 

 

 

It's not the worst way I've lost a character, but it's up there. What irritated me the most about it was that I'd spent so long slowly developing Buglips and I got annihilated by a rerun character who'd been made a week before. The immediate result was that I stopped gaming for several years. The roll was legit, but I'd come to think the effort was no longer worth it. It's the nature of the game - if you remove the risk of rolls then there's no game, but if you keep them in you always run the chance that something like this will happen. It's an irreconcilable flaw built into the very nature of RPG's.

 

But eventually we decided to play again and we wound up with a better game. First, the exploding wizard guy moved to BC and started a family (to my knowledge, they remain unexploded thus far). Second, we banned Wild Mages forever since that class was responsible for at least 80% of unexpected friendly fatalities. And third, my new philosophy moved away from creating a complete character/story to play and embracing the randomness to create the story instead. I'm still inclined to make notable characters, but I'm also inclined to take enormous risks and see what the dice reveal. It's less satisfying as a tale, but more satisfying as a game.

 

I should also note that Buglips was created for an experimental campaign where three DM's shared reponsibility, me and two others. Each created a separate story arc that blended into an overall whole, and since each DM played twice we each had two characters to switch between. This actually worked out well overall since our DM styles were extremely similar. My other character was a Doomguard, and Buglips despised her. We fought for control of another character's soul - a koboldsticker gnome whom the Doomguard tried to sway towards entropy and chaos and Buglips tried to bring back from the edge and save.

 

This more than once put me in the curious position of having to roleplay a passionate disagreement with myself. Inevitably conflict would have happened, and either the Doomguard would have won over the koboldsticker to embrace entropy and done away with meddlesome Buglips; or Buglips would have saved the koboldsticker's soul and with his help defeated the Doomguard and her apocalyptic plans.

 

Really my only regret is that the idiot wizard denied us all the opportunity to see how that would have played out. I'd have played it all straight, too. I can't say who'd have won that contest. Straight up player vs player, the Doomguard had it easily. But Buglips could inspire people, so he might not have faced her alone. He'd have pleaded with her, in vain, and tried to the end to save her as well - fighting futility all the way to the end. I think it would have been epic, no matter who took the day.

 

But, y'know - *BOOM*.

 

What I haven't had thus far is a human character, because as my hubby says, why would you want to play a human, we ARE them and it's fairly boring!

 

 

Funny you should mention that, because outside of Buglips, my Tiefling, and my newly-minted half-elf druid every other character I've played has been human. I'm a minimalist player. Where most people I've played with like to stack races, and classes, and kits to make something unique I'm more inclined to take the simplest concept I can and build up from there.

 

I'll use kits, but only after I've solidified my idea and then I'll see if something exists that I can use for it.

 

I was once challenged to make a bone stock plain human fighter, no kits or special anything, and see if I could make him memorable. People still speak of Samnos, even though his career was cut short by another idiot player.

 

I have an unwritten contract now that specifies who I will and will not play with, and I am tyrannical with its enforcement.

Edited December 31, 2012 by buglips*the*goblin

[redambrosia 78348]

Ya, my hubby/DM wouldn't have allowed your character to die. Unless someone does something absolutely, epicly dumb, and the dying is their own fault, he'll go out of his way to make sure your character lives. I had a giantess who died, but was saved by Tyr (who apparently rewards people who fight valiantly, but vainly, against giants by not letting them die). But he would have totally let the wild mage die, after all he's the dummy who made a wild mage

 

So far I think my most memorable character has been my pixie priestess. When I made her I rolled monsterous craving (I think that's what it's called) and picked shiney things as that which she would crave. So in our first little adventure, sneaking up on a pack of bandits, she was very nervous because she'd never been in battle before. To calm her nerves her dwarf friend told her that the bandits had shinies. So in the most high-pitched voice I could muster I yelled "FOR THE SHINIES!!!!" and sealed my fate as the shiney obssesed pixie. I still get teased for it, hehe

Edited December 31, 2012 by redambrosia

[The Inner Geek 1211]

I chose to use The Inner Geek as my online handle because names containing 'awesome, handsome, fun,' and 'desirable' all seemed so pretentious.

 

That, plus I'm a closet geek. No one at work knows about any of my hobbies nor do any of my neighbors. The only reason extended family knows about my hobbies is that my wife thinks it's very creative and likes to include my hidie hole where I paint and build in tours of our house. She used to be especially fond of showing people my 40k Reaver Titan-thingy, "that he worked so hard on", before I boxed it up.

 

The name itself came when I started my blog. Not much happening on the old blog these days. I did have an Inner Geek t-shirt made though when I went to Games Day 2011.

[Jester 112]

I am Jester. Jester I am.

 

Did I say something funny?