RollforgeJC's playground of tools & experiments

Naming the site (and the names I almost went with)

· by JC

Naming a site is harder than building the first version of it. I spend forty-five minutes getting a page to work, feel pretty good about it, then lose the afternoon staring at a domain search box like it owes me an answer.

Part of the problem is that a name has to do several jobs at once. It needs to be easy to remember, not impossible to spell, and broad enough that I do not regret it as soon as I add something outside the original idea. Then you check the domain and learn somebody in 2009 already had the same thought.

Naming takes longer than the code

The first version of this project was always going to be a collection of generators and random tools. That gave me plenty of words to play with, which did not make choosing easier. Dice words sounded too narrow. Name words made it sound like the site could only do one thing. Anything too polished started feeling like a company I would have to explain at a networking event.

I wanted something that could hold fantasy names, a decision spinner, TTRPG tools, and whatever else gets added later. The name did not have to describe every page. It just needed to sound like a place where making random results made sense.

That is a much fuzzier brief than it looks.

The shortlist, and the disasters

Here are a few names that made it far enough to be written down:

  • ForgeDice: clear enough, but it leaned too hard into dice.
  • NameAnvil: not terrible, but it sounded like a productivity app for people naming LLCs.
  • RollCabin: I have no defense for this one.
  • Generator Grove: pleasant, but a little too soft for a site that also makes cursed taverns and warband names.
  • DiceDump.biz: I hovered over this for way too long. Do not ask what I was thinking.

The shortlist was useful, though. Every bad option told me something. I did not want a name that sounded like a single tool. I did not want one that felt cute in a way I would get tired of. And I definitely did not want to type “DiceDump” into an email address for the rest of my life.

Why Rollforge stuck

Rollforge landed in the nice middle area. “Roll” covers dice and randomness without boxing the site into tabletop games. “Forge” makes it feel like results are being made rather than pulled out of a dusty database. Put them together and it sounds like a place where you go to make names, outcomes, and little bits of campaign chaos.

It also has enough room to grow. I can put an elf name generator next to a password tool and it does not feel completely strange. That flexibility matters more to me than a perfect one-line explanation.

There is no grand brand story hiding behind it. I did not find the name in an old notebook or have a lightning-bolt moment. It sounded good, it fit the project, and I could picture it at the top of the page. That was enough.

Domain luck is a feature

The final test was the domain. If Rollforge had been taken, this post might be a very embarrassing defense of one of the names above. Finding an available domain that is short, readable, and not suspiciously close to someone else’s thing is rare enough that you should take the win.

So I did. I registered it before I could talk myself out of it, then went back to building the actual site.

Maybe there is a better name somewhere. There probably is. But naming a site has a point where more research stops helping. You pick the one that fits, get the domain, and make the thing worth naming. That is the plan with Rollforge. You can see what it turned into on the about page.

Rollforge just sounded like a spot where you make random results. Also the domain was free, which never happens, so I took it before I could talk myself out of it.

Is this a deep brand story? No. Did I almost launch as DiceDump? Unfortunately yes.