The Pressure of Finding the Right Name

My biggest problem with my toons is finding the right name. I'm not very good at it and have deleted tons of alts in the 20s due to what I consider to be lousy names. And most of the time I think of something, it's taken. I'm also not the kind that would do ".:SuperHeroName:." type stuff.

Is there a thread, or forum, or whatever to help people get ideas?

A Random Name Generator would be interesting. A Random Combo of Adjective/Verb + Noun.

I once used "Wotdahellzdatting"
I ended up deleting it. (You can use it if you want).

I do this a lot. Currently I have a Grav/Thorns Dom I want to rename and I still can't come up with something I like. This has been the case for the last three months or more.

Well, there's name generators like:

http://www.seventhsanctum.com/genera...perheronameorg

Which I sometimes use to spark name ideas.
If I have a name I particularly like, and it is taken, I sometimes
revert to Latin, but more often revert to a Thesaurus.

I suck at names. It's the single hardest part of the process for me.
Character concept? Easy enough.
Powersets I want to play? Got a ton of builds I'll probably never use saved in Mids', just 'cause.
Costume? Sometimes a little tricky, but I usually find something I like.
Name? Prepare myself to sit at the registration screen for an hour, brainstorming.

The random generators never really impress me, or even give me good ideas, but the ones I come up with on my own often lead to me wondering what the heck I was thinking when I came up with them. I've taken to using a thesaurus for inspiration, but even that doesn't work most of the time for me.

The name usually comes before the character for me. Sometimes even before I've decided on powersets, never mind the costume.

I pull inspiration from everywhere. Puns amuse me, like Radiation Leek my plant/rad troller. Word play can be fun as well, like Ohmie The Clown, my elec shield scrapper (Ohmie don't play dat!)

For the first three years, almost all my toons were exclusively lizards of some description(Sally Mander for instance) I really found it easier to come up with a name if I could stick with a theme. For example, I am working on the three fates at the moment that are designed with full incarnate in mind, because as they say, even the Gods heed the fates.

It often seems as though the names write themselves. Hell, I've been thinking about names inspired by my favorite songs lately, and there are just too many options...

I'm just the opposite, I think of a really cool name, then rack my brains trying to think of an AT and powersets that fit, sometimes trying several different combinations til I get one I like.

Anita Hero (get it? "I need a hero!") eventually became an Eng/WP tank.

Brawn Star (get it? Bronze Star, a military medal) started as as SS/Inv brute in Praetoria. He kinda stalled in the mid-teens. I like the name, I just gotta find something more appealing to me than SS/Inv.

Agent Uh Oh Seven, is - obviously - a DP blaster. A very clumsy DP blaster. I just can't think what secondary to use. Devices is too obvious.

Just thought I'd mention that through Seventh Sanctum and pure luck, I snagged Chance Thought on Virtue. Sometimes it just takes crazy luck. Good luck to all of you!

First: The Virtue Name Watch

Secondly: Every name from the Virtue Name Watch in a spreadsheet (thanks to Tempest_56 for that)

Yeah, basically through 11,921 posts we had 24,008 names. There are similar threads on a couple other servers, but nothing like the original. Even if someone can't find a name for you, they'll usually provide the inspiration for one.

Finding the right name for me is part of the fun.

There was a thread at one point, I think down in City Life that was strictly that, people would have a concept but need recommendations on a name with the requirements that it be available on the server in question.

I've seen people pose the question in here to get a name and down in the Fan Art forums as well.

I have used a number of different things to name characters. I created an elf maiden arch/ice blaster and actually went to google found a site that translated English to ELF and she wound up Lorian SIndenari' To be perfectly honest I forget what words I typed in that created that.

Got a little silly with my Plant/Rad Troller.. Named her TANDAR... now turn that around and split it down the middle RAD (Rad) NAT (nature or plant) hehehe

Ragin' Reb is my SD/SS tanker and he was purely off the top of my head. I wanted a good old boy type super that dressed like he was headed to a NASCAR event. Reb always has on a cowboy hat and boots... Oh and most of his shirts are tank tops. his bio lists his ambition to help people and maybe some day get famous enough to meet Carrie Underwood cause that girl is just so darn purty!

Then when I decided to create a BS/SD scrapoper I made her a Valvyrie shield maiden and just grabbed a name that sounded semi Nordic.. and Kala of the Valkyrie was born.

I have an Agent M1.. named after an Army tank and an older military rifle. interesting M1 is a scrapper NOT a tank.

My other tanker is ... Tia Anker moves ia aside and pushed T and Anker together.. TANKER

I had a dark/dark defender I named Tia Amat simply because it was a name I'd been assigned on another game site and i liked it. MONTHS later I discovered I had sort of named my defender after a Goddess. A husband and wife team complimented me on the name and asked if I was into mythology. LOL I had to go and look up Tiamat on the web

Big help aren't I? basically I have over 30 characters on Virtue and i just sort of threw together names based on whatever for almost all of them.

Only my main and one other character I can ever think of has had their name pre-ordained before settling on power choices or costume.

One or two have been named from power choices rather than costume or concept.

Most of the rest I still follow Powers>Costume> 5 hours picking a name.

it can be very inconveniant if i'm starting new alts with a friend or something.

Quote:

Originally Posted by VoodooGirl [*]Watching out for the Spinning Disco Portal of D00M!*

I think the best name I ever came up with was Roadhouse Tony Blaze, who is a sideshow style Fire Blaster. I don't play him much as my main is a fire/ice.

I think I've settled on a name for my new alt.

I tend to try to get words that sound good together. I might fill a page with words that I like during the day and then try to fix them together. Candyjet, Saltier, Betty Forever, Trixi Chalk, and what I think I'll name my AR/Ice is Fix Peppery. Yeah, I know, doesn't make any sense, but once it's a name, it's a name.

Finding the right name is compounded by the fact that nearly all the best names are already taken, especially if you are on a high population server. It took me nearly a month to come up with my name for my Mind/Psi Dom and now that I have him and the costume, and he's level 12, I'm thinking of re-rolling Blaster and changes the concept to better fit the name!

I've only really had naming troubles twice with my crew...

The first was my grumpy old broadsword scrap. When I was coming up with his backstory and personality, I knew right off the bat what I WANTED to call him. There was never in question to me what his name was... The problem was that, unlike Palrah and the rest of mine using personal names, his name was a "real world" one. I wanted to call him Saiph.

No dice. Someone had already claimed it. (Along with the rest of the stars in Orion, it turns out. I checked them all later on when I built my Warshade. )... So, old Saiph ended up being the very first of my Rularuu bird-things to have a "Hero name" that was different from his own. He ended up being called Quicksilver Falcon (an Exalted reference, since I play a lot of eclipse-caste Solars-).

The other was much more recent, and kind-of surprised me. I was building another of the bird-things (a Dark Corruptor-) and decided that I wanted to call him Adamas. Since I'd had no trouble getting Suzume, Anu, Kephren and a number of other not-common-but-not-exactly-obscure-either names, I thought I had a pretty good chance at that one. Again, no such luck... and Addie has ended up going by Seraphim Chanter.

The "replacement names" in those two's cases don't bother me, really. They suit the characters well enough and since I've given other toons even sillier names (I have a Peacebringer named Mist in Moonlight, it just doesn't GET much sillier than that-) they don't even stand out as mismatches on my selection list... They're just not the names I wanted to begin with.

The links provided are great and there was some naming guide that could possibly help... lemme see if I can find that and link it...

Also... Toothbrush or whatever is actually a great name!!


A bunch of naming guides linked in the Guides To Guides thread under II. Before You Start... under Character Creation.

Demonweed's non-dairy naming guide Demonweed [I9]

Guide to naming without replacements Harry_Canyon [I8]

Naming For Noobs: A Guide To Originality! Tyrantula [I7]

Naming your Character Speed_Bump [I6]

A Guide to Creating a Name for New Hero Characters tpull [I4]

MrMarvel's Quick-and-Dirty Guide to Naming Heroes MrMarvel [I4] {Dead link}

Villainous Titles Proserpine [I6]

The Adjective-less Naming Guide! ThornWeaver [I9]

I can't speak for any of them, but figured I'd paste 'em here!