I was playing with display names last night. I made a little quest which would run inside a vampire lair with a boss container, rename some of the vampires and rename the followers my player took with him. I ran the quest manually through the console. The non-unique vampire renamed himself nicely, but the unique followers held on to their original names tightly. Since the stuff I read said nothing about unique nlpcs being ineligible, and since at least one unique character has the display name changed at one point, I wondered if anyone would explain what the difficultly might be.

The four followers shared an message dedicated to the quest, They were all marked 'optional,' 'allow reserved,' 'uses stored text,' and 'clears name when removed.' They were all "find matching reference' with conditions.

The vampire worked as a conditional, "matching reference" npc, but the player followers did not.