I’m wondering if I should try DMing and it feels like a huge responsibility to make it from scratch (though I assume it largely falls into place if I can figure out material conditions that allow for quick improvisation)
I’m wondering if I should try DMing and it feels like a huge responsibility to make it from scratch (though I assume it largely falls into place if I can figure out material conditions that allow for quick improvisation)
It depends. If I don’t have an existing idea for someone I’ll sit and click through generated lists over and over until something sticks out at me as something usable or that gives me some root syllables to work with, and I’ve got a list of fifty or so random names to fill out extras that can be promoted to characters depending on what happens. I’ve also used that sort of thing as a way of shortcircuiting a weird anxiety I had about actually naming things myself in the past, although I’ve gotten over that since.
But at the same time, yeah: one of games I’m running has characters named after Gilbert and Sullivan (my players still haven’t caught this one), a character with a gag name that includes two references to a bit from an old BBC show, expies of pop culture characters, no less than two gag characters named after Joe Biden, and some almost-onomatopoeic gibberish names, and the other one has multiple names built by distorting Latin roots in a descriptive way and multiple uncaught references to semi-obscure Roman mythology, alongside a bunch of off-the-cuff puns, shitposts, and randomly generated but still curated filler because I had a lot of things to name and even more that I just numbered instead.
Very fair
Also fair. Not writing at all is a bigger wasted opportunity and getting hung up on anxiety about that one specific part instead of glossing over it (including with a generator if that’s what the anxious person finds suitable) so they can do the writing they feel more confident about to get their footing makes a lot of sense.
Personally, I’d feel way more anxious about presenting a dozen characters with names I got from a generator and saying “this is my writing that merits paying attention to” but we’re just talking about different genres of irrational impulse, not any sort of value judgement that I’m trying to assert.
It was a way of obviating responsibility, I think. Like sure I was ultimately choosing the name of a character or a place, but it wasn’t “mine” so I wasn’t taking responsibility for it and putting something of my own out there, I guess? I never really understood just how that shortcircuited the anxiety that makes me pull back from putting things I create on the line, just that it did let me work around that when GMing, and that things like just copying an entire generated list of names to throw down as a list of notable employees at place the players were going to heist and letting them pick one for me to turn into an actual character they’d try to lean on or steal security credentials from or whatever was extremely useful.
And now I just do whatever because I’ve had enough experience just riffing on stuff that I’m less anxious about that. Proper characters get referential names or descriptive names, and extras get random bullshit whether from a generator or from me just stringing syllables together in my head till it sounds right. Places get both.