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Unpredictable Results
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The notion of unpredictable results has long been an easy source of intrigue on television. Its most common form is the exotic technology or mysterious mythical artifact. Often the in-character source of a Deus ex Machina. Sometimes a source for drama, where the sudden, unexpected result can either give the heroes something to fight and/or resolve, or save their hides. Othertimes, used for comedy; "either it will cause peace and happiness throughout the land, or plunge us all into complete pain and fear. We're not sure." Advertisement:propertag.cmd.push(function() { proper_display('tvtropes_mobile_ad_1'); })Essentially, the opposite of Functional Magic. In gaming, unpredictable results are often (but not always) achieved through Gameplay Randomization, e.g. Random Effect Spell and Randomized Damage Attack. Examples: |
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Roughly 50% of Riff's inventions in Sluggy Freelance work like this. The Dimensional Flux Agitator has a particularly spotty record. | |
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ADOM has magical pools which can be drunk from for random effects, from being cursed, to being turned invisible, to gaining a wish. | |
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Alias was particularly ambitious with this trope, basing an entire arc around exotic "we don't know what it's for" technology. | |
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SCP-914, AKA "The Clockworks" is entirely based on this, as is SCP-261, a profoundly unpredictable vending machine. | |
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The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion: The Wabbajack is a magical staff that can turn a creature into another, different creature at random. Any interaction with Sheogorath, Daedric Prince of Madnessnote and, incidentally, the Wabbajack's patron Daedra, has just as high a chance of going incredibly well as it does of going catastrophically poorly; scholars indicate this is true on a mathematical level. |
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The various shipboard items used to fight The Awful Green Things From Outer Space might injure them, cause them to grow, or do nothing at all, completely at random. However, any specific item continues to have consistent results once it's been used. | |
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In John and Dave and the Temple of X'al'naa'thuthuthu, the sequel to John Dies at the End, the Furgun embodies this trope. Technically it does whatever the user wants it to do, but getting the result right is finicky. It's as likely to enlarge things as it is to turn them into mashed potatoes, blow them up or give them beards. When the narrator tries to defend himself with it, the mental image of an old painting of Jesus flips into his mind, so the painting pops out of nowhere and starts shooting lasers out of its eyes. When he has an urgent, urgent case of Kill It with Fire, he does all he can to imagine flames as he pulls the trigger. Nothing happens. Then there's a streak of light in the sky... | |
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In Path of Exile, corrupting a piece of equipment via a Vaal Orb can do a variety of things to an item. It can add a powerful implicit modifier or change a gem socket to white. It might also do nothing, or worse, transform the item into something else entirely. While powerful, the downside is that once an item is Corrupted, it can't be modified further, except for very certain aspects which are prohibitively expensive. The Altar of Corruption can add two implicit modifiers, change every socket color to white, or outright destroy the item. The Scourge league added tainted currency items that can only be used on corrupted items, but have even more wildly varied results. For example, a Blacksmith's Whetstone adds a set amount of Quality to an item, up to 20%. The tainted version sets it to anywhere between 0 to 29%. |
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Collapsing a hypergate in The Lost Fleet can cause an explosion anywhere between "tactical nuke" and "supernova". | |
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Dungeons & Dragons: The Wand of Wonder (the Rod of Wonder in later editions)— a magic item whose effect is randomly determined from a table of 50 or so possibilities each time it's activated. Possible effects range from shooting fireballs to turning a random combatant into a rhinoceros, and a popular pasttime on the game's official forums is coming up with new and even more bizarre effects for the item. Wild magic in 2E could have similarly unpredictable effects. An even more powerful but similar item is the Deck Of Many Things, where any card you draw can have really good (you gain a powerful magic item, a fine warhorse, or a small castle) or REALLY BAD effects (you lose all your money, your good reputation, YOUR SOUL...). It's been nicknamed "Total Party Kill in a can" for good reasons. Previous versions of D&D had a LOT of utterly random effects, usually as dungeon features. The module "In Search Of The Unknown" had a set of magic pools whose effects when drunk changed with every sip. Unpredictable results are a core part of D&D, as well as many other roleplaying systems. Wandering monsters, random encounters, loot, many spell effects and curses, and much more are all often determined by dice rolls and tables. Many supplements are little more than a bit of flavour text followed by pages and pages of encounter and effects tables. |
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The Lab Ray in Neopets, which can add stats, take them away, change species, or even change gender. | |
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In an episode of Pinky and the Brain, The Brain warns Pinky never to use more than one drop of his shrinking serum, because "it would cause a reaction on the molecular level that is completely unpredictable"; the reaction turns out to be turning people into huge yodeling clog dancers. | |
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Galaxy Quest has the Omega-13, a device created in a Cliffhanger two-part episode of the eponymous Show Within a Show which was never resolved, meaning its function was never revealed until a bunch of aliens re-created it (It Makes Sense in Context... sort of). Its results are successfully predicted near the end, but only as one theory among many; nobody knows for sure what it will do until it's activated. | |
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A disclaimer on Ned's Declassified School Survival Guide is "Your Results May Vary". | |
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The King of Fighters: The finishing move of Chang's Tekkyuu Dai Bousou is consistently inconsistent across its numerous appearances. Results include (but are not limited to) a gut check, a Rolling Attack, a slide and a front kick. | |
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In Lost's season 4 finale, moving the island is said to be "both dangerous and unpredictable" (partly to explain why it wasn't done before.) We know it resulted in transporting Ben to Tunisia ten months into the future, but we have no idea where or when the island is. Eventually we find out it was sent skipping through time randomly across thousands of years. Kind of. Because we definitely saw it disappear to the Oceanic Six, but only the Losties (and not the Others) were moving in time on the Island. It's complicated basically. | |
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40k roleplay games (Dark Heresy and consorts) have a table of varied psychic phenomena, one of which may or may not happen when a psychic power is cast. The worst of the lot are the "perils of the warp", which are just as varied. In fact, this deserves explanation. The player rolls from 1-100, and can get results for up to 75. (Though, each result can get a few choices, so let's be generous and say 25 choices). Why up to 75? Because go beyond that, you move to the Perils table...which has ANOTHER 1-100 roll, of more like 35 choices. Total of about sixty choices. The worst? Instant death. Second worst? Instant Daemonhost. |
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The Pokémon attack Metronome, which allows a 'Mon that knows it to perform almost ANY attack at random. There's also the slightly-more-controlled Assist/Cat's Paw, which randomly uses a move from one of your teammates' movesets. |
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Magic: The Gathering: Red mana is the color of randomness, chaos and unpredictability. Most of the time that appears in the form of cards that happen to interact like that; for example, creatures attacking the turn they come into play and changing the targets of other effects are both red abilities, and both result in unpredictable game states, especially for your opponents. Some effects, though, genuinely require players to randomize things, such as by flipping a coin or rolling a dice. In its most extreme form, the card Scrambleverse will assign every card in play to a new controller chosen at random. Other colors can have unpredictable effects too. For example, a blue/green card literally named Unexpected Results which can cast the top card of your deck for free, but forces you to shuffle it first, making it nearly impossible to manipulate the randomness. |
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Enter the Mists of Ravenloft without a Vistani guide, and you could find yourself wandering for any amount of time, from minutes to months or (rarely) even decades. Likewise, you could end up in some other dread domain, come right back to where you started from, be dropped off on your world of origin (if you're an outlander and your DM is merciful), or even get deposited on a completely different D&D campaign world from your own. And while you're wandering around in there, you could encounter literally anything along the way. |
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In the webcomic Tales of the Questor, Quentyn's magic sword, Wildcard, could go from unstoppable to useless with every attack due to the unique way it was first charged (A night of drunken spellcasting by Quentyn and his friends). | |
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Warhammer 40,000: Anything connected to the Warp or Ork technology. Represented ingame by psykers suffering "perils of the warp" attacks and more esoteric Orky wargear having its own tables of random effects. Ork psykers are beyond random, rolling just to see what completely-unpredictable power they get... every turn. Each new version of the Ork book adds new ones - from the return of the Shokk Attack Gun (which has a Strength you roll for and occasionally does things like explode or teleport the Big Mek into its target), to the Lootas getting random numbers of shots, to the invention of the Bubble Chukka (produces a spray of bubbles which range from S1 AP 1 to S6 AP 6 based on a die roll). Also, plasma weaponry with the "Gets Hot!" special rule. In the 41st Millennium, plasma weapons are Lost Technology - poorly understood, rare, very hard to replicate and more often than not hundreds of years old and maintained by people who don't have a damn clue how it works. On a bad roll, the unreliable electromagnetic field generators safely housing the plasma may fail causing several-thousand degrees kelvin fluid to leak out all over the forearms of the unfortunate sap holding the gun, or a capacitor might break and send gas of the same temperature into his throat and lungs. In older editions, the weapon would even rupture with lethal results for the user and everyone standing near him. Plasma weapons however are capable of giving even Terminator Space Marines a bad day when they do work properly, and it's not like you'll roll a 1 every turn, right? 40k roleplay games (Dark Heresy and consorts) have a table of varied psychic phenomena, one of which may or may not happen when a psychic power is cast. The worst of the lot are the "perils of the warp", which are just as varied. In fact, this deserves explanation. The player rolls from 1-100, and can get results for up to 75. (Though, each result can get a few choices, so let's be generous and say 25 choices). Why up to 75? Because go beyond that, you move to the Perils table...which has ANOTHER 1-100 roll, of more like 35 choices. Total of about sixty choices. The worst? Instant death. Second worst? Instant Daemonhost. |
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The Allspark and the key it empowered in Transformers: Animated, which apparently has a mind of its own. | |
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Exposure to Chaos in Warhammer yields unpredictable mutations, which in extreme cases can turn the character into a mindless gibbering Chaos Spawn. | |
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Downplayed in 7 Wonders Duel. Building The Great Library makes you draw three random Progress Tokens from the five that were discarded at the beginning of the game, but you get to decide which one you actually want. While all of them have a positive effect, their impact depends on the Token and the game state. | |
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Red kryptonite has unpredictable effects on Superman which last for forty-eight hours and are never repeated. As the essay The Well Tempered Plot Device puts it, this means the writer can try on any daft idea they like with no effect to the comic's continuity. | |
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The Funky Bomb in Scorched Earth is a very randomised weapon. When it hits, it fires out shots of its own in random directions. It might take out five opponents, it might only take out the one it landed near, it might do nothing, or if you're exceptionally unlucky, it might even end up taking you out. | |
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The neurotransmitter Promicin, in The 4400 is described as unpredictable — somebody injected with it will either gain a superpower or drop dead, and there is no way of predicting what that will be. When Shawn and Burkhoff start researching a way to predict whether someone will survive or not, Jordan Collier asks them to stop, as it will end up turning the world into those who have powers and those who know they will never get them. He prefers the more unpredictable way, as it just requires "one generation of sacrifice" and then the world can move on. | |
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Beware if you play as a Necromancer in Ironclaw; if you try to cast a spell, and you roll at least three 6's, you'll get hit with a magical backlash that does totally random (but always negative) things. In fact, the official rulebook encourages DMs to get as creative as they could with what happens. | |
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In Dungeon Crawl one can worship the god Xom, who can do essentially anything to you on a whim, good or bad. The probability of getting a good effect is raised by how amusing Xom finds you at the moment- and the easiest way of amusing him is by doing things that have random and potentially disastrous outcomes, like drinking unidentified potions. | |
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Buffy the Vampire Slayer, episode "Earshot", where Buffy is stung by a demon and learns only that she will gain an "aspect of the demon", which could be anything (it turns out to be telepathy). | |
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Any casting in F.A.T.A.L., with possible miscast effects including "caster thinks he's a cat" (funny), "caster becomes a serial rapist" (not funny, but apparently intended to be), "caster gets raped by gay ogres" (not at all funny) and "accidentally casts F.A.T.A.L." (a wonderful chance to play a different game). | |
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Magic is like this in GURPS. When it fails it does so in extremely random ways. There are at least six different official tables of backlash effects ranging from "Black Magic" (which results in Body Horror) all the way to Cosmic Humor (which causes reality to mock you in the most painful way it can). | |
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The Wand of Wonder from Baldur's Gate strikes whoever its pointed at with a random effect. | |
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Unpredictable Results | |
| Unpredictable Results / int_f849875f | comment |
A major arc of the webcomic It's Walky! centers around this. The Head Alien uses a machine to stop time in Canada (Citing his reason as, "I figured, who the heck would notice? Damn if I wasn't right...") in order to trap a demigodly alien known as 'The Cheese'. However, overuse of the time-stopping device creates unpredictable results, such as reversing the gender of everybody in the vicinity, giving somebody an afro, or turning him into a Pirate... | |
| Unpredictable Results / int_f849875f | featureApplicability |
1.0 | |
| Unpredictable Results / int_f849875f | featureConfidence |
1.0 | |
| ItsWalky | hasFeature |
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| Unpredictable Results / int_f9fc872 | type |
Unpredictable Results | |
| Unpredictable Results / int_f9fc872 | comment |
The Heart of Gold's improbability drive in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy works by producing a near-infinite number of unpredictable results and then "picking" the desired one (usually going from Point A to Point B) and sticking with it. Of course, the temporary side effects of engaging it (such as turning into a penguin or generating sperm whales) aren't exactly pleasant. At one point this is invoked by activating the Improbability Drive without specifying any desired result at all, on the theory that since Our Heroes are about to be killed by oncoming missiles, any outcome at all is preferable. It works, as the missiles are transformed into a bowl of petunias and a very confused whale, which is very bad for the petunias and whale, but very good for Our Heroes. | |
| Unpredictable Results / int_f9fc872 | featureApplicability |
1.0 | |
| Unpredictable Results / int_f9fc872 | featureConfidence |
1.0 | |
| The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Radio) | hasFeature |
Unpredictable Results / int_f9fc872 |
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