Character creation and the birthday paradox
Today we had the first session of my first DnD campaign as a player. Myself and another player both showed up with clerics with a hermit background. Not only that but both of us have the deaths of our mothers as key backstory. (We're different races, though.) The birthday paradox is at play here. Get a half a dozen people showing up with independently created characters and you're more likely than not to have two of the same class.
Still, it weirded me out, like we're copycating each other or something. I haven't been this weirded out since I found out another person on the cross country team had the same middle name as me. (I have a unique first and last name, so I'm not used to sharing a name with other people.) I'm probably definitely overthinking this. It doesn't help that this is my first character and I'm self conscious about the whole thing.
Have any of you other Tilda Swintons ever had a character that was similar to another player in your party? How did you react? How did they react? Have any of you had a hermit cleric with a dead mother?
Man, if you two were the same race (or maybe still, I don't know how phenotypes work in your world ;) there woulda been one heck of a united lost twins opportunity there.
I've never had this happen to me, but then again the last character I created was for a prologue adventure to the one I was running (my friend ran it so we could play while I was getting ready to defend my PhD). I ended up making a 5e tinkerer (from UA I believe) who had accidentally created the ancient evil that the party in my adventure was trying to stop, not much overlap on that one :p
United lost twins wouldn't work in our case, but it would awesome if it did.