It all started with an NPC

For Halloween, I decided to create a oneshot for my friends. We're all still pretty new to D&D, so I wasn't completely sure what to expect from our first oneshot. It went great, but my biggest mistake was naming the NPC who offered the haunted house as a place for the players to stay. The NPC was a fisherman named Dave. My players, of course, became fixtated on Dave. At the end of the oneshot, they found him and beat him up.

Skip forward to last month when my friend and I were planning a Christmas oneshot. We thought that it would be fun to add in another character named Dave. From there it just snowballed. Now we have an entire homebrew species named Dave. They are all defended from the original Dave, who they worship as a god. All the males are named Dave, and all the females are some variation of Dave, such as Davette. Exiled Daves are named David. They all live in the city of Davetopia. Daves are shorter than regular humans and live to exactly 500.

The Daves have two sports: Dave Ball and Basketdave. Dave Ball is like soccer, except that ball can't touch the player's hands or the ground at all, and the game lasts until on team is 20 points ahead of the other. Basketdave is like basketball, except that there is no ball. Baskets are scored by crowd surfing Daves into the basket. The game ends only when a) all the Daves used for making baskets are injured, or b) a team reaches 102 points.

Now Daves are going to become a regular occurrence in our campaigns and oneshots. I have now learned the power behind giving NPCs names.

Note: none of us have anything against anyone named Dave or David. I had asked my friend for a name for the original NPC because I couldn't care enough to search for hours to find the perfect name. This is the name she gave me, and we took it and ran a marathon.