one of the scarier eras of rpgmaker was when the most straightforward answer to "how do I store a string in a variable" was "just rename a character"
I say one of the scarier eras because it's still not as bad as making custom combat systems pre-XP, and also because there are still use cases where the dummy character thing is still true
people pass around the fallout 3 train-head screenshot a lot, but it never really seemed like "when an rpgmaker game remembers some text it asked you for, unless it's extremely recent and displaying programming aptitude besides, it's making you name some random bloke with no face who is technically in the playable characters section" entered into common knowledge
