Many parts of a Video Game can be decided by Random Number Generator. This trope is when an item's functional description or Flavor Text is controlled so much by the generator that it has a chance to be different every time you look at it. That chance can be 100%, so long as the randomization happens due to rereading/reopening the text or the event of randomization cannot be predicted based on in-universe measurements like time.
While this trope also allows names to change, it doesn't overlap with Constantly Changing Name unless it changes in a Can't Move While Being Watched style, to be fast enough, and has no hints of sentience guiding the changes, so it's truly random.
A Random Effect Spell cast by using an item, that gives a different Flavor Text on each result, goes better under there too. Other independent triggered randomizations also don't count, such as a daily news broadcast that changes, well, daily, but you have to look at your television to catch it. If it doesn't change because you're looking at it, it doesn't count. And similarly, things that change as part of their function, such as a Magic 8-Ball, also don't count if the description changes because you're making it change, in that case, by using your shaking as a randomization function. And since randomization is involved, other RNG-related tropes like Luck-Based Mission and Random Event may overlap. Speaking of luck, using a loop to cycle through lines instead of just picking randomly might be basically a Bad Luck Mitigation Mechanic, allowing players to not miss content instead of just hoping a line comes up.
The presentation of this trope can vary as well, at its most minor, only one word in a sentence may change, instead of anything broader, but if it's a Randomized Title Screen overlap, it's usually broader.
However, this is not a subtrope of Flavor Text, just highly related, because this can, and as the examples show, has been used for functional text instead. Related to Stop Poking Me!, because poking NPCs might result in randomized lines of dialogue instead of a preset sequence, and environmental items that could give randomized text, are basically just inanimate object NPCs. Creepy Changing Painting is similar in that it's also about things changing at usually random, but it is also visual, not textual.
This trope is especially unlikely in voice-acted games because it eats up voice-acting time which is more expensive than just writing text. And while this trope can be described in non-digital fiction, even if it can't actually occur, even that's rare because its random nature does not lend itself to practical use.
Examples:
- Balatro: Misprint's description randomly and rapidly changes the amount of Mult it says it'll give, to allude to how it gives a random amount of Mult. Occasionally, it'll even change to the rank and suit of the top card in your deck.
- DemonCrawl: If you have the Omen "Book of Maths", all numbers in the game's tooltips will be changed to a different number every time they appear.
- Dungeonmans: One Pay2Lose option causes Unknown Item Identification to fail sometimes. When this happens, the item's description will be several sentences of randomly-generated incoherent nonsense.
- Genome Guardian: The "Jester" turret randomizes its description from a selection every time said description would come up, some being "Chaos dances in jest." and "Madness under the big top."
- Hades: The menu for selecting the random options of a Boon, also has Flavor Text randomized out of usually three options for each Boon-giver.
- Hades II: The menu for selecting the random options of a Boon also has Flavor Text randomized out of usually three options for each Boon-giver, and they're different from the lines given for the same Boon-giver in the prequel, if they were also there.
- NetHack: While hallucinating, certain actions may result in phrases mentioning colors, and the color is randomly decided upon doing the action. Actions such as looking at yourself in a mirror, which results in "You look [color]", instead of a line that's basically "You look pretty / ugly".
- Rogue (1980): In the latest versions
, a hallucinating player will see colored objects with colors that randomize every time they're interacted with.
- Slash'EM: A hallucinating player will see colored objects with colors that randomize every time they're interacted with.
- Star of Providence: Battle Ball, as it's known in the game's files, is called by a different (synonymous) name every time it's listed (either in the Monster Compendium or as a cause of death on the game over screen).
- The Angry Video Game Nerd Adventures: The death screen features a randomly-generated Would Rather Suffer quote, such as "I'd rather have a pixie vomit in my ear than be stuck here in this bloody monstrosity of a game any longer!", or "I'd rather suck vomit from a badger's scrotum than continue this poopy game!".
- Card City Nights: The Beta Bird card's Flavor Text is randomized from a list on every view. And the ones seen in the card selection menus at degraded quality also don't match the ones seen when looked at full size. The texts are:
This card was rejected for faulty flavor.
Dude check out that amazing bird!
Everyone needs a bird.
"Flip" this card? We can't write that!
"See the world", they said. "Get a bird", they said.
Demand for birds far exceeds the supply.
"Hands off! I found it first!"
Gotta have a bird.
It's bird-picking season.
They were jealous. They wanted one of their own. - Dwarf Fortress: Each time the player loads the title screen, a synonym for greed and another for hard work is picked to be part of the subtitle.
Histories of [synonym for greed] and [synonym for hard work]
- Forgive Me Father has the fourth boss — colloquially referred to as Glitch — whose lifebar name is a gibberish mess of random letters that constantly changes itself.
- Friday Night Funkin': In the startup sequence, various memes, phrases and jokes can show up before the title screen. These include:
"Better than Geometry Dash — Fight me Robtop"
"'dope ass game' — Play Station Magazine"
"shoutouts to Tom Fulp — lmao"
"ultimate rhythm gaming — probably" - Hello? Hell...o?: Checking the window has a 1/6 chance to get a different result, that's also an ending. Technically it's an image, not a "verbal description", but an image is worth a thousand words.
- Kerbal Space Program: In Career and Science modes, various agencies and companies will give the player procedurally generated missions to accomplish: place a satellite with a specific component in a specific orbit, take a temperature reading at various locations on another planet, and so on. Each mission comes with a procedurally generated and humorous narrative explaining why they want you to do whatever they're asking.
- Kingdom of Loathing has a brick item which can be used to "prank" other players by smashing a window of their house, but if they don't have a house, the game says you "throw the brick at him/her while he/she isn't looking. The brick hits him/her in the [random body part]. That was mean — you shouldn't make fun of poor people."
- Mass Effect: The pause screen displays a hint randomly selected from a pool of several.
- Metro 2033: Redux: Pausing the game changes the randomized hint given in the pause screen.
- Minecraft:
- The title screen's splash text is randomly selected from at least 360 different quips every time the game opens. A few of these only appear on certain dates and they're also customizable.
- Some of them are Shout Outs, for example:
- There is one Dummied Out-esque message hidden in the files that reads: "This message will never appear on the splash screen, isn't that weird?" Indeed it won't, as modifying the splashes.txt file to contain that line will crash the game. However, the message does appear on the splash screen of the Legacy Console and New Nintendo 3DS editions of Minecraft.
- There's a 1/10,000 chance that the title will say Minceraft instead of Minecraft (good luck noticing it though).
- The title screen's splash text
- Nightmare Realm: In The End...: The main menu is a Randomized Title Screen where glowing graffiti fills in what will happen "in the end", switching between different possible grim ("love must die"), hopeful ("light will be shed"), or ambiguous ("who will prevail?") outcomes.
- Sandcastle Builder: Words in the game can randomly accumulate typos on a new NewPix, some of those words typoed can be in the descriptions or names of things.
- Standstill Girl: The "Shadesville Magazine" in Alice's Room has a high chance of changing its contents when viewed again, its second item is always an advertisement but the service advertised changes, and the last item is "A Word From (Alice/Tiska/Gulinello)", and all options are available even they're not relevant anymore, such as the Red Shadelings still advertising their challenge after they've all been defeated.
- West of Loathing: The sarsaparilla item's name is almost always misspelled, with the exact mistake (sarsparprillaa, sasaparillarla, sasssaprillia, etc.) chosen randomly. The difficulty of spelling the word is a Running Gag throughout; the usage quote is "You drink the sa... saubstance," and the effect you get from it is called "Saspawhatever", both of which have spelling mistakes.
You were never sure how to spell this, and you still aren't.
Non-Video Games:
- The 1975 short story "The Book Of Sand" by Jorge Luis Borges contains a Tome of Eldritch Lore. A mysterious book in an unknown language that has no beginning, no end, pages that are out of order, and never allows the reader to see the same page twice — and it is implied that the number of pages is infinite.
- SCP Foundation:
- SCP-1336, a.k.a "5,000 Dots", whose appearance is usually apparently random, but sometimes reacts to its environment:
SCP-1336 is a single sheet of 8.5" x 11" 110 lb. card stock. [...] Appearing on the paper are roughly 5,000 dots, [...] While each individual dot moves seemingly at random, they will all form recognizable patterns from time to time.[...] Almost without exception, the patterns created appear as structural formulas for various organic compounds. [...] SCP-1336 is known to have produced images unrelated to structural formulas on six separate occasions.
- SCP-6159, a.k.a "Primrose Fatish Von Trevil, Formerly the Book-Bound Devil" has the binding book where:
The text within [its] pages is seemingly random, and changes constantly when unobserved.
- From the Log Of Anomalous Items:
- Vol I mentions:
A coverless book with 50 pages, when opened it will display pages from different parts of different novels and books, there are no set patterns to what pages that appears in it. The pages will randomize again if book is closed and reopened.
- Vol III: Anomalous Item 723:
A 1st edition copy of the Yu-Gi-Oh!TM card "Pot of Greed" (YGLD-ENB26 Edition), which, at random intervals, changes the description of the card to drawing a different number of cards.
- Vol I
- SCP-1336
