Randomized Transformation

The power to transform yourself or other objects can be pretty fun. Testing your luck with a Random Effect Spell can also be pretty fun. When the two things are combined, however... The result is that you're gambling with chance, but in a way that can leave permanent effects, good or bad.

Most often this is a game trope, where the ability to randomly transform something or someone is hard-coded and can affect how you play. You might end up getting what you always wanted...or you might be stuck with something horrible. You choose to roll the dice, gambling over potentially permanent changes just for the thrill of it. In Tabletop Games this is often flipped into being an attack or defense ability that randomizes things for your opponent.

In another medium, this random transformation is something that just happens in-universe to something or someone, usually more than once, in order to show off the odds of it going horribly wrong. It's the characters who become affected rather than the audience, so this can be used for both comedy and horror depending on the context. They rolled the dice, or had the dice rolled for them, and either lucked out or lost everything for the sake of an experiment. Sometimes in this case there is a predetermined outcome, but the characters don't know what it'll be beforehand, still making it come off as randomized even if it's technically not.

Note that what is transformed doesn't matter. Creatures, objects, and more can all qualify as long as they're altered by random chance. Also note that while the transformation usually carries a risk of permanence, temporary versions can still count as being downplayed.

Compare Random Effect Spell, where the results are even more unpredictable. At least here, you know something will be turned into something else, the question is just... what? See also Perpetually Protean.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Doraemon: A gadget of the week, the "Wordplay Transformation Capsules", allows users to turn into the first object they see, and into assorted stuff via wordplay in which the first letter of the new object must start with the last letter of the previous one. Nobita tries using this gadget to impress Shizuka, but being The Ditz Nobita accidentally turns himself into assorted random stuff including turnips, a katana, an onion, a piece of dried squid, a handbag, a pegasus and finally a T. rex in the final page.
  Nobita: Help, I'm stuck, I can't turn back to myself!
• Hunter × Hunter: Whenever Kite calls upon his Nen conjuration ability called Crazy Slots, his energy morphs into a physical weapon. However, due to the inherently roulette nature of his ability, the received object is randomly selected out of nine possibilities. He has to be creative and make do with whatever he gets if he doesn't want to die.
• Chopper from One Piece can normally shift between three different forms thanks to his Devil Fruit abilities, and also developed a special drug called a Rumble Ball that gives him access to an additional four forms for a brief period of time. However, should he take more than one Rumble Ball in a six hour period, then he'll start randomly shifting between all seven forms without any way to shift consciously until the drug's effects run their course.

Films — Animation

• The Emperor's New Groove: Due to how poorly (if at all) Yzma labels her potions, it's always a wild guess on what each of them does. Because of this, when Pacha and Kuzco get a hold of a bunch of potions to change Kuzco back into a human, they go through a roulette of animals while on the run, never knowing what Kuzco will turn into until they are down to the last potion.
• Moana: When Maui recovers his magic fishhook from Tamatoa's back, he tries to turn into a giant hawk, but 1000 years without practice causes him to turn into a small fish, and then into random animals. Moana has to save him from Tamatoa, and his spirit is broken because he cannot control his transformations. It takes a while and a lot of encouragement from Moana and Mini-Maui for him to try again, but it works when they suggest that Maui start with small animals. He successfully becomes a bug, then a lizard, then a shark, and finally a giant hawk.

Literature

• In Discworld: The Last Continent, The Librarian catches a magical disease that causes him to transform into a random creature or object every time he sneezes. Although he always keeps the red fur of his usual orangutan form.
• In Flip, the characters gain alien disks that make them temporarily become legendary historical figures... At least, mentally. Who they become isn't known until after they flip the disk. At one point, a character complains that their first attempt gave them Edgar Allan Poe, which made them spend their night in a state of paranoia.
• Harry Potter: The process of becoming an Animagus involves becoming an animal once the spell is completed, but there's no way to control the animal you turn into. This isn't a big deal for wizards who can turn back, but if the process goes wrong, then they'll be stuck as that random animal forever.
• Johannes Cabal: Limbo is a World of Chaos where everything is mutable. In "A Long Spoon", Johannes spends a short time as a halibut, but other humans are much more unlucky — a hit of Chaos magic reduces one person to his body weight in bouncy balls.
• Storm Thief: The setting is constantly affected by something called "probability storms." These "storms" randomly change whatever they come in contact with, from rearranging certain areas, to changing the color of someone's lipstick, to shutting down a character's lungs.

Live-Action TV

• Doctor Who: While Time Lords have shown some degree of control over their regenerations into a new body, the Doctor's in particular have generally been left up to chance. Everything from their hair color and length, to their accent, to their biological sex could have changed without them realizing it. They often spend the first episode post-regeneration marveling and mocking what they now look and sound like.
• Kamen Rider Geats: The first quarter ends with the Riders gaining access to the Fever Slot Raise Buckle, a slot machine that can roll any of the previous six main Raise Buckles and its associated superpowers, a Jackpot result where they gain two of the same Buckle with vastly increased power or a bust where they instead get a garbage weapon. The slot machine can be rolled any number of times but with no guarantee of a better result each time.

Newspaper Comics

• The page image comes from Calvin and Hobbes, where in one strip both titular characters fight with Calvin's transmogrifier gun by turning each other into different animals or objects.

Tabletop Games

• Ars Magica: The high-level ritual "Mists of Change" calls up a Fog of Doom that transforms every human in a large area into random animals. The change lasts a year.
  On a roll of 10, the storyguide picks a creature; be cruel.
• Dungeons & Dragons:
  • The spell reincarnate brings the target back from the dead in a new body of a random species. Prior to 3.5 Edition, the new form was most likely to be an animal or something even more exotic; later editions at least limit the options to humanoid species.
  • Wild Magic can sometimes cause random temporary and permanent transformations, ranging from blue skin to turning into a plant.
  • The Sibriex is a type of demon that has the power of flesh-warping and can force a random transformation on a creature that is affected by its Warp Creature ability or that willingly submits to being transformed. Example transformations include the target's arms and legs swapping places (preventing them from moving unless they crawl), growing an additional head or their eyes pushing out of their head on stalks.
• Magic: The Gathering:
  • Exaggerated by Chaos Warp, which shuffles a permanent back into its owner's library, then the owner looks at the top card of their library and puts it on the battlefield if it's a permanent card. This means that a creature hit by the spell may turn into a completely different creature, or a different card type altogether.
  • Tibalt's Trickery effectively takes a spell and turns it into a random spell from the library of the original spell's owner.^note The "Choose 1, 2, or 3 at random. Its controller mills that many cards." clause is there to keep the spell's owner from stacking their deck to be guaranteed to get what they want.
• Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay: Chaos can inflict all kinds of permanent random Mutations, including adding or exchanging extremities (humanoid or not), becoming a Beast Man, losing all skin and flesh, growth, shrinking, becoming a Brown Note Being, and polka dots.

Toys

• BIONICLE: One of the Kanoka disk powers is "reconstitutes at random", which forces a random transformation upon its target. It can turn a monster into something harmless... or make it much more dangerous. Since there's no way to predict the outcome, it's basically a gamble whenever this disk is used.

Video Games

• Ancient Domains of Mystery: Corruption is one of the central themes during your adventure to save the lands from an ultimate evil. Your character will experience corruptions on your journey, usually in the form of random physical deformities. Certain corrupting artifacts are needed to get the better endings of the game, so just carrying or using them will guarantee some form of corruption. Very rarely will players ever be given a chance to undo these random transformations, usually in the form of a Genie or a blessed potion.
• Angband has Polymorph, which changes an affected monster into another. Initially the transformation could be anything that wasn't a unique monster, so a Greater Titan could turn into a White Mouse, or a Clear Icky Thing could turn into a Drolem. An update would eventually limit the randomization to monsters of equal threat.
• Balan Wonderworld: The Box Fox costume gives the ability to transform into an iron box that smashes things...but it can't be done manually. It happens at random "when it feels like it", sliding down slopes and causing a chance for the player to fall off the platform.
• The Binding of Isaac:
  • The D4 transforms all of Isaac's held items except itself into other items at complete random, completely changing his current playstyle. This can also be done by a 1 or 6 pip Dice Room. Since many of the items change Isaac's appearance, it also heavily changes what Isaac looks like.
  • Clicker turns your current character into a different random character on use, with the one restriction that it can't turn normal characters into Tainted characters and vice versa. This can be used to cheese unlocks by playing the game as an easy character then hoping to Clicker into a harder character just as an unlock-gating boss is about to die.
  • Tainted Eden's gimmick is that every single time they take damage that's not considered self-harm by the game^note Sacrifice Room spikes, blood donation machines, Razor Blade, and so on, their entire stats list and item inventory is re-rolled, as if they rolled a D4 die with every hit. Birthright helps offset this, as items Tainted Eden already had before picking up Birthright will be safe from further randomization.
• Board Game Online:
  • The Quantum Physicist class is entirely based on RNG. One of their abilities involves changing items into other random items, which can sometimes affect items in other player's inventories.
  • The Improbability Device can be used to transform items into other items.
  • The Dark Spell "Polymorph" can turn a player into a random animal, forcing them to gain karma to turn back.
• In Cataclysm, mutations randomly occur, whether provoked by the player or by events.
• In Diablo II, Charsi the Blacksmith will imbue an item for you after you complete her quest. The item will become more useful and powerful, but the effects are completely random, cannot be undone, and she'll only do it once. For this reason, players often wait until they have a really good item before having her imbue it.
• Dicey Dungeons: The Polyjuice Potion and Mutate gadget in the Halloween Special turn the enemy into another random enemy of the same level. Using the former twice will transform the enemy back while using it on yourself will turn you into a random contestant instead for the rest of the run. Like with the Bear, clearing it will still count as clearing it as the contestant you started with.
• Dragon Quest III has the Staff of Change, or Mod Rod, which has the power to alter the physical form of the wielder, or an entire party's worth of people in one cast. However, you have no control over what form you take, so if you're looking for a specific effect, you're stuck spamming it.
• The Wabbajack, a recurring item from The Elder Scrolls, is the Daedric artifact of Sheogorath. It's a staff that can turn a target into many random things, ranging from inanimate objects to harmless animals to high-ranking Daedra.
• Hearthstone: Shamans have access to various evolve and devolve effects, which transform minions into random ones that cost 1 more or 1 less respectively. While a higher-cost minion will generally be better, it's still a highly variable effect. You could turn your 3-drop into an 8/8 Nozdormu the Timeless, but you could just as easily turn it into a 1/1 Wicked Skeleton.
• Heroes of the Storm: Brightwing's Polymorph ability turns the target into a crab, squirrel, or pig at random. There's no mechanical difference between any of the forms though, it's just for flavour.
• In Newgrounds Rumble, Convict periodically transforms into another fighter at random, then transforms back after a certain amount of time.
• Noita has several examples, most notably the spell modifier Chaotic Transmutation, which can turn a substance into a random other liquid or powder, and the magical liquid Chaotic Polymorphine, which if splashed onto any creature (including the player) will transform it into another random creature.
• Random Dice Defense:
  • Random Growth dice, after several seconds on the field (depending on their dot count), transform into a random die from your deck with a random dot count. This can go anywhere from getting you a powerful 7-dot die early in the game to turning a 2-dot Random Growth die into a 1-dot one.
  • Cracked Growth dice, after a few seconds on the field, transform into a random die in your deck, with their dot count either increased or decreased by one. While they have the potential to randomly go all the way up to 7 dots or down to 0 and self-destructing, they are much less likely to go wild in either direction than Random Growth dice are.
  • Growth dice (the kind without an adjective in the name), after several seconds on the field, turn into a random die in your deck with their dot count increased by one. They're essentially an improved version of Cracked Growth dice; while they take a little longer to transform, they can only increase in dot count.
• The Sims 4: The "transformation ray" can turn objects into other completely random objects. It's possible to end up with objects that can't be transformed, but you can also keep experimenting until you get something useful... but, more often than not, it becomes utterly random and useless.
• Sky: Children of the Light: Downplayed with the Resize spells, which permanently change the height of your in-game avatar to a random value between "child-sized" and "a head taller than the default". The only way to change your height if you don't like the result is to use another Resize spell and hope for a better roll.
• In Slay the Spire, there is a "Face Trader" event where you can choose to swap your face for something new. The effects are randomized and there are 2 good heads and 2 bad heads, while the fifth one is a Joke Item which has you yell out something along the lines of "CACAAW!" at the start of each combat.
• Wizards Castle is an old text-based Roguelike dungeon crawl game. Within the castle are three magic pools on each of the eight levels. Drinking from a pool has a random effect on the player, even with multiple drinks from the same pool. The player's strength may be raised or lowered, as might one's intellect (needed for spellcasting) or one's dexterity (to dodge enemy attacks). The pool can also change the player's race (elf/human/dwarf/hobbit) or the player's gender. It's possible to enter the castle as a weakling male hobbit and emerge (or perish) as a mighty female elf.

Web Animation

• Strong Bad Email: In "redesign", Strong Bad updates his No Loafing sign to make it look more modern. But instead of choosing the new color scheme himself, he uses "Color Wheel Roulette" to decide, and winds up with a drab palette of browns, yellows, and greens.

Webcomics

• El Goonish Shive: The Magic Mirror in the "Title Pending" arc has the ability to save any magical transformations it sees and copy them for later. Due to the mirror's faulty design, however, it became overloaded when it copied too many spells and released a pulse that transformed almost everyone present into someone else at random. Although given the kind of comic they're in, most of them are used to being transformed by that point.
• Goblins: The author of the comic tended to have wildly random elements. One is a wheel found in Cursewalk, and spinning it causes a transformation into another species. Idle got Goblin as the first spin and did a second spin to have it land on Rabbit.
• League of Super Redundant Heroes: Thanks to messing with the Timey-Wimey Ball too much, Audrey ends up causing a Time Crash which begins rapidly altering the past and, because of her Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory, from her perspective causing her to transform into random things. She ends up turned into a man, a black woman, a dolphin, an Eldritch Abomination, and many more things over the span of a few minutes.

Websites

• Neopets: While most methods of altering your pets inform you of what the transformation will be, there are a few ways to get a completely random result:
  • The most famous way is to just go to the Secret Lab and let your pet be experimented on, with a chance of having their color or species changed. The same is true of Petpets and the Petpet Lab Ray. The ray is one of the only ways to get certain colors.
  • One of the discontinued random events involved getting drenched with random paint water from the sky. This painted your pet a random color.
  • While fishing, you can find a "Flask of Rainbow Fountain Water", which also grants a random color. There's also the "Mysterious Swirly Potion" which can change your pet to a random limited-edition species.
  • A few items have a more limited effect, turning your pet into one of the four base colors (red, blue, green, or yellow) at random. These items include Turnip Tonic, Rainbow Swirly Potion, the Kaleideonegg, and the Vortex Negg.
  • The Witchy Negg has the option to turn your pet into a Lenny, Tuskaninny, or Moehog.

Web Videos

• Critical Role: Campaign Two: In a moment of Bathos near the climax, Caleb's spellcasting in a difficult fight triggers a Wild Magic surge that turns him into a sheep. Caduceus restores him by invoking Shape Dies, Shifter Survives and braining him with his quarterstaff.
• DougDoug: Skyrim but EVERY HIT turns people into a random species is Exactly What It Says on the Tin; every punch transforms the recipient into a random creature, which raises countless issues, especially when accidentally hitting quest important NPCs and needing to repeatedly fight them until they turn back into a human again.

Western Animation

• Ben 10:
  • The Omnitrix was designed to allow its wearer to transform into any of the aliens it possesses a DNA sample of. However, while it was intended for the user to have full control over which alien they become, various factors throughout the different series have resulted in the Omnitrix transforming its current user, Ben Tennyson, into an alien other than the one he selected, with no way of predicting which one he will actually turn into. At times, this has resulted in Ben not even bothering to pick a form and just activating the Omnitrix while hoping for the best.
    Ben: You know what, Omnitrix. I give up. Surprise me.
  • The Omnitrix also has a Randomizer function to do this deliberately. However, in addition to not having control over the alien selected, Ben also can't control how long the transformation lasts before he is switched to a different form.
• Dexter's Laboratory: The pilot has Dexter and Dee Dee zapping each other with an invention that transforms them into random animals, ending with the two transformed into each other.
  Dexter (as Dee Dee): Why not. I’ve been everything else today.
• The Emperor's New School: Just like in the movie, Yzma doesn't label her potions, so when the characters want to turn somebody into a certain animal, they often turn them into a completely different animal for various episodes.
• The Legend of Vox Machina: When Scanlan tries out a spell scroll found in a dragon's lair, he finds himself transformed into a frog. In his attempts to get back to normal, he turns into a unicorn and an elven female version of himself in short order before getting back to his gnome self. He later figures out how to control the transformations by singing the incantation.
• Played With in a classic bumper for the PBS Kids network, with the animated boy and girl mascot characters flipping a switch which triggers a random transformation for the character on the other side. Eventually it ends with the boy transformed into a bouncing ball and the girl turned into a bee.

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