"Clever" Character Names Often...Aren't

If you've been a gamer for very long, you've probably come across quite a few players who have named their heroes after characters from literature, TV, or film--and likely been guilty of it yourself at some point! Many players, both old and new, are prone to obsessively recreating their favorite heroes as faithfully as they can with any new RPG's rules set they try out. For a host of reasons (inexperience with the rules, strict power caps on starting characters, clashing opinions about the character within the player group, etc.) many end up frustrated when it doesn't work out to their satisfaction. And along the way, they often end up annoying their fellow players with their presumption. ("Oh, sure, you're Alannon. And what level are you again?"*)

One problem with trying to slavishly trying to copy a fictional character is that you're not experiencing the full range of characters in the game. If you're hung up on the idea that your wizard has to be an old, mysterious know-it-all, just like Merlin, or Gandalf, or Elminster, then you'll miss out on all the other ways to play the class. And no matter how awesome those characters might be in their original settings, they might be a very poor fit for the campaign you've joined. Especially if you want to play the world's most powerful arch-mage, when you've joined a game that starts at 1st level! Instead, give some thought to playing the new kid on the block, who someday hopes to rub shoulders with those legends, and show us all how to do things differently than the predictable tropes of characters everyone knows.

There are times when it can be appropriate to use a name that copies that of an established fictional character, or that is a clever take-off of one. For example, players and GMs tend to be less strict about setting-appropriate names for one-shots or less serious games--and in deliberately silly games, anything goes, the punnier, the better. Less obvious homages can work in more serious games, particularly when the name or character are on the obscure side, and when the character is much more inspired by a fictional hero than based on one. 

In my own games, I do put up with a certain amount of silliness in names, because my players are there primarily to have fun, and to blow off steam from their busy lives. Their jokes are part of the price, and the joy, of having a loyal group of friends to game with. So, for example, my Pathfinder games have  featured animal companions and familiars named for Pokemon or dirty puns. If I ever tried to tackle a more historical game, I'd probably put more effort into policing names, but I'm also not sure that's really this group's kind of game in the first place.

Organized play is very much a crap-shoot when it comes to character names. For every serious, fantastic name that helps build immersion in the world, you'll have a Barbarella, a Harley Davidson, or  a Herlock Sholmes.**

In all fairness, I'll admit that not all of my Pathfinder Society and Starfinder Society characters' names are entirely serious:

• I named my tengu cavalier "K'Chaw" as a joke, and only gave her a "real" birth name, and a story explaining the nickname, after playing her for a few levels. 
• My kitsune hunter/rogue is named Mumbly Peg, after the "game" played with knives. She usually just goes by "Peg," so her full name rarely, if ever, gets any comments.
• Nar-Lok, my creepy heavens shaman, gets his name from the Loc-Nar in the movie Heavy Metal.
• My kiirinta (a moth-like fey species) mystic is named Tekeli-li, after the sound that the shoggoth makes at the end of At the Mountains of Madness (which Lovecraft lifted from the giant albino penguins in Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym).
• My gnome envoy and musician is Toknomonicon, which was never meant to be anything more than a random mouthful of syllables. But once I had worked out that much, of course he had to be known for doing "Tokno remixes."

My mindblade magus, Cassilda Tillinghast, has a much more serious name, but it's still ultimately a pair of Cthulhu Mythos references. The surname comes from a past Buffy/Angel RPG character of mine, Patricia "Trick" Tillinghast, upon whom Cassilda was very loosely based. This surname was used by Lovecraft for the scientist in his short story, "From Beyond," because it was a historical New England family name. Because the game I played in was set in New England as well, I drew heavily on Lovecraft for my PCs' and their relatives' names (Trick's cousin is an Olmstead descended from Gilmans and Marshes, for example). The name Cassilda comes from Robert Chambers' "The King in Yellow" stories, where she is a central character in the cursed play that gives the cycle its name. I liked the sound of it, and it's obscure enough that you would need to have read Chambers or have played certain Yellow King-themed adventures (such as one of the later books of the Strange Aeons Adventure Path) to recognize it. Nobody who has seen me play my Cassilda has ever hinted at knowing anything about the other one yet. 

This is the kind of literary name that I like best: it alludes to a work of fiction, without copying any particular character too much (if at all). It's a cool name that stands on its own, with or without any explanation of its origin. And there's very little if any of that "Hey, see what I did there?" nudging and winking that the names that started me on this rant are shamelessly guilty of.

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* True story: One of the players in my college AD&D campaign named his wizard Alannon. I hadn't read any of the Shannara books at that point, but my roommate had, so he gave the the wizard's player serious side-eye for his choice of name. I let the player keep the name, but my roommate loved to rib him whenever "Alannon" spectacularly failed at an attempt to do something impressive.

** Real examples of character names I've encountered online, just in the past month or two!