Hello, everyone. I am new to the idea of speedrunning, and while I enjoy watching speed runs, and playing games quickly, I'm still trying to figure out what games I might want to spend the time to learn to run quickly.

I love pokemon games, and have recently gone through yellow, crystal, and pearl using the speedrun guides to play through them quickly. I enjoy the routing ideas, and all of the glitchless runs, but I am struggling a bit with the idea of RNG manipulation.

I guess in my mind, manipulating your seed feels like a glitch. I do not think it is a glitch, but I feel like I would rather run the games where I just start the game, and take what I get, and not have to rely on specific stats and natures.

I am curious if anyone else considers this a viable category, or does everyone just like doing RNG manipulation? The route would be slower obviously, and revolve around safety strategies and figuring out what extra EXP/items you need to make up for stat shortcomings of your starter.

The problem with this kind of category, of course, is that you can randomly get a really good starter, at which point, it will be just the same as if you manipulate the seed, so what's the point in having a separate category?

Let me know what you guys think, and I'll check back as I'm trying to go through black.

I'm also new to checking out the speed running scene. After I heard some guy got a world record for beating crystal in a little over 3 hours, I decided to check it out. It looks / seems like he uses a lot of RNG manipulation, which to me, I consider it the same as bug/glitch abuse. It'd be nice if there was actually a category for no rng manipulation / no bug abuse / no glitch abuse; nothing that can seem like a cheat of some kind.