(I am very bad at this whole thing so if you have the patience to explain it please do, but it'll be difficult lol)
I want to make a system where at the beginning of the game it asks for the players name and then they also get to choose custom names for characters in the game if possible. How would I go about making that happen?

http://docs.textadventures.co.uk/quest/character_creation.html

You can adapt this for other characters by changing their alias' instead of the player's.