How did you choose your name?

[Rowde]

Show my age...

Way way back I was trying to register to play a Telnet RPG... Before I could actually play I had to send in a detailed bio of my character. The game was more on the RP side, there was a full list of player characters available and I guess in the interest of variety they were giving bonus allocation points for starting your name with less common letter characters and for playing less common races (it was sci-fi RPG). Based on that I chose a less common race whose naming convention was that their names were incredibly long and mostly looked like gibberish, and thus were somehow condensed (either as some kind of acronym or a set of the beginning letters in the name) when being addressed by other species. I chose to begin my name with 'R' because that was one of the less common letters to begin a name with.

iirc, my species were telepathic jellyfish things who usually had mind-based abilities (mind-control, mind-wipe, etc.) and generally looked down on other species. I don't remember the full name tbh... Rowdethiclurminoxdecart... it went on... but I know I intentionally shortened it to 'Rowde' because my idea was that the name would be pronounced like 'loud' only with 'r' in front. However, that dangling 'e' on the end would most likely cause ppl to mispronounce it as 'rowdy' so then I would have to correct them... basic lifeforms that they are... it brings me no joy in having to constantly redress them.

At any rate, as part of the bio I had to write like... my character's immediate intention or something... and as the game was in progress, I had to catch up on the established lore and such. Apparently I misread something though, as my character sheet was rejected and the GM pointed out the reason why (iirc I was thinking I was secretly an assassin on a covert mission in the Federation based on some war I had read about... but apparently that war had already been resolved and the faction I was supposed to be from had been dissolved...) and although they did offer me some suggestions about how to tweak the character... it had already taken me a crap ton of time to roll that one and I was like... already "married" to the idea I had created so... ehhhhhh... never actually played the game.

I kept the name though. Went through a couple transitions here and there. When I played OG PSO on Dreamcast 'Rowde' was Purplenum iirc... but I wasn't a big fan of spears (Characters' names determined their ID tags, which in turn affected their common loot drops) and by dropping the 'e' my ID tag changed to Bluefull for swords. So I was 'Rowd' in that game... until one of my friends thought I got the name from a jobber character in Suikoden II... and I wasn't having any of that so that silent 'e' got reattached ever since. Sometimes when we play medieval or high-fantasy games I insist that the name is pronounced 'row-day' instead because I'm wearing my fancy pants... Ser Rowde of House Rowde...

FFXIV was the first online game I played where I could put in a separate surname, and I felt like Rowde was better suited for that. So it could be a 'family' name for alts if I wanted.