Quick analysis of character names here on GP

One of my most significant hurdles in character creation is coming up with a good name for my character. So to get inspiration I looked through my other character names the search for inspiration

So I made a histogram of the first letter of my current GP character that went into play. It showed me that I did not have a character where the first letter was "U" or "Q" and that was enough for me to come up with a name.

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Now since I do data analysis for a living I poked one of our awesome dev and got a database dump of all the 23.070 characters. Of those I cleaned up the names, and removed emojis and special characters (i.e. * " @ ^). I took only those marked PC and with a character name longer than 1 character after cleaning. That left us with 16.087 characters



What I found was that the general trend is remarkably similar to my own distribution. M,R,S,T and A are popular, while I Q and U are unpopular.
In the word cloud, we see a lot of Captain's, Agent's and Brother's

This makes sense as the some of most common letters in English are r,s, t, and a (nice). More shocking is you have 0 names starting with D or V! Very cool info presentation though! I tried to analyze mine but I realize I need more characters lol.

I wonder if this dataset correlates to the score values of letters in Scrabble.

I'll leave that to smarter people to determine.

That's a fun little analysis. Interesting

Is this based on sheet names? I often name my sheets "[name of the game] - [character name]", so I bet I contributed to that "[" percent. XD

I love how the cloud has both Captain, Capt and Captian. That's a lot of captains! I wonder how many of them are fantasy, modern and sci-fi...

Also, I spy Ravenwraiths from my legacy campaign in the cloud. I feel accomplished.

I spy Retired, von and App and now I have the name of my next PC 😁

@FlyingSucculent there is a difference between the sheet name and the character name. I used the character names. Personally, I use a "x-" in front of the character sheet name for characters that are no longer active. It put them in the bottom of the sorting list.

Yeah, I know, that's why I asked! (Figured it might have been easier to use sheet names since character names on different sheet designs are in different fields.) And now I wonder why there is at least one character with "[" in their character name. XD

makes SHEET and CHARACTER a bit of strange names though...

Maybe an Android

Might be placeholders while people come up with their names

Here are the names that stats with "["

Those look more like sheetnames than character names. Weird

To make the Characters Menu on the bottom bar or the Character shortcuts by the dice roller work and make sense once characters have been retired or died, they can be tagged in the name. Else they would need to removed from the game.

Those menus do not care about the sheet name.

Maybe we need a way to mark sheets as excluded from those menus?

Hm, I never considered that 🤔 I always just kept those sheets floating around and they never bothered me. But that's a good idea. Maybe some way to mark a character as retired, moving it to the bottom of the list of your sheets and excluding it from those places. It would remove the need for workarounds like rune's "x -"

And the "x -" does not work on the Characters Menu anyway, since if it sorted by Player name.

Yeah, S was by far my most common letter for character names! Not sure if I should try to even out the trend or lean into it.

Reminds me of @Moofsalot and all her X-named PCs. 😀

Fascinating how so few people don't have any names starting with D. I can understand the rarer letters like X, Y, Z, but D is so common. I wonder if there's something behind that. Here's mine for fun.Sample size isn't too big. I GM almost as much as I play I guess lol. Slight bias towards letter S, and I have one D! (Although that was a premade character I think lol). From now on, every new character will be a letter I haven't used yet!

Interesting thought on the D. If we don't count last names, then I also only have one character who starts with a D