User:Umbire the Phantom/Randomizer

Imagine if you will Alice and Bob, each sitting down for a round of gaming. Alice's game of choice is Pokémon, but instead of your usual Com Mons, she immediately hits upon Olympus Mons as early as the first route - and she can catch them more easily, too! Yes, you could cheat up encounters like that if you wanted to - but what if the game shuffled its Random Encounters in such a way that you could come across one by luck? Or what if Bob were replaying a Final Fantasy game (pick any game in the series), but instead of chests containing your standard basic potions and starter armor, you instead happen across mid-game armor or even an Infinity+1 Sword?

All that and far more is possible through the magic of the Randomizer, which randomizes and shuffles certain aspects of gameplay such as item and enemy locations - it's most often encountered as a type of Game Mod, and occasionally as a feature of the game itself. Randomizer mods are generally a form of Self-Imposed Challenge, though it somewhat straddles the line - by its very definition, the resulting challenge and changes in difficulty compared to the default game can be wildly variable. Game mod randomizers can also supplement other mods and/or Self-Imposed Challenges as well.

Action Adventure

 * The Legend of Zelda series:
 * The Legend of Zelda
 * The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past

Role-Playing Game

 * Most of the Pokémon video games have a randomizer:
 * Pokémon Red and Blue
 * Pokémon Gold and Silver as well as Pokémon Crystal

Sandbox Game

 * Minecraft is entirely dependent on a randomizer to make each world, called a "seed". This figure, which can be customized by the player, determines the world you create and the various ratios of NPCs, flora, fauna, and everything else you might encounter. In theory, it's technically limitless.

Real Life

 * Real Life is entirely randomized, and every event, without exception, is run through a randomizer for everyone involved. This is a good thing, in that Real Life is never going to get old because no two people will ever have the same experience. The bad side of this is that means every event has a chance of a bad result, and some of those results can make progression Unwinnable.