I hear the term "gonzo" used in games, a lot. The RPG Pundit, +Kasimir Urbanski, posted something about this a while back, but I actually started this post in December 2014, because I fucking hate how (many) people use this term.
1. Break from strict genre boundaries (i.e., you've got chocolate-lasers in my peanut butter fantasy!) in ways that (a) demonstrate that the line between genres was there and (b) draw into question the value of the distinction(s) between them.
2. Weirdness, zaniness, whimsy--The carnivalesque elements are coming in loud and clear. This weirdness is not just comic, though. It can also be horrific or spectacular. It is a break from the mundane, and one that highlights the joys and dangers of that departure.
3. Let's do something awesome! I mean this in the sense that we want to WIN. We want to win with STYLE. We have a set of rules and game mechanics that allow even a zero-level schlub or 1st level character to do things they should not be able to.
4. There are other trace elements in the game, from other places--e.g. the cultural aesthetics of the 70s and 80s, whether from music or literature or comics or cartoons or whatever.
5. Gonzo means that something unexpected not only CAN happen, but is relatively COMMONPLACE. "Whoa, man, a halfling on a dinosaur with deathray arms..."
"Yep, must be Thursday."
5. Gonzo can contain some degree of adolescent (male) fantasy, and some of that means things like boobs & cheesecake, indiscriminate slaughter, murder-hoboism, and the like. This does not need to be the case, but often is. When it is, some people enjoy it, and it can be fun. Some people don't, and may find it "problematic."
6. Gonzo means different things to different people. The word can be taken as prejorative--indicating that something is silly. This is the thing that pisses me off the most. I don't mind being serious about gaming, and playing serious games. I also refuse to draw a line between "serious" and "gonzo." These are not mutually exclusive terms.
7. It can even be a reference to the absurdist tradition of H. S. Thompson, and beat luminaries like W. S. Burroughs, R. Crumb, the Freak Brothers, and things like that. This is, perhaps, the overlooked element. Breaking with "straight" reality is a political gesture in a limited way. "I refuse to engage with your straight reality. I reject the premise that this game must be played in a particular way. Look! I got a fuckin' laser pistol!" This can also lead projects to projects like 's Narcosa, or 's Red and Pleasant Land, among others. It finds "the normal" wanting, and invents something else.
8. Too much gonzo upsets some people, even people who like gonzo stuff. Sometimes people just need a break from it. Alternately, they can also need a break from grim-darkness. I know that's part of the reason I found the move from Dark Heresy to DCC so refreshing. It was like waking up from a disturbing dream to find out that there's a party going on, and I can smile and laugh again.
9. Gonzo draws from a variety of traditions, aesthetically, and some of those traditions aren't even meant to be silly. For example, GWAR demonstrates that heavy metal, as a genre, can be self-aware that it's pretty damned silly. Slayer, on the other hand, does not demonstrate this self-awareness in its aesthetic. That doesn't mean that it's not also silly. Nor does that mean I don't like them both. Hell, as I've blogged on several occasions, Redd Kross is a great bubblegum band. Bubblegum music is both aesthetically simple and predictable (sometimes even shitty) and absolutely awesomely fun (to me). Another example of silly fun: The Dickies. They also are a really decent band (to me).
10. Just because something is weird, or just because it departs from genre in jarring ways, doesn't necessarily indicate that something is gonzo. DCC RPG can be played deadly seriously. Part of the distinction (to me) is that the outcome matters. Death Frost Doom, for example, has a lot of stuff that could be read as "gonzo," in that it takes a bunch of metal tropes and inserts them prominently into its adventure milieu. The fact that those trope-y, stereotypical elements (brutal metal, zombies, crazy, reclusive dude, etc.) are there, that's not enough to make it gonzo. Because it matters what happens. You can end the world. You probably will. There's not reason why DCC RPG (as many have suggested) cannot support SERIOUSNESS. The issue is that what happens, matters, and has serious in-world implications, even if it is silly or gonzo in some senses.
11. Gonzo is about embracing the chaos. Weird shit will happen. The world doesn't simply exist as you would have it. You will be challenged. Your tastes and experience will be challenged. It may make you uncomfortable, and push you out of your "comfort zone." I often listen to music that I don't necessarily like, but am interested in experiencing, and seeing where it can take me. Some of Zappa's stuff, for example, is hard to listen to. I do it anyway, because I want to feel what my brain does as an result of listening to it. There are so many other examples of music, film, art, and so forth. It doesn't need to make you feel good. You don't have to "like" it. It doesn't have to gratify you. It may make you sad, or grossed-out, or it might alienate you. This is one element of what I consider "gonzo" that often gets overlooked: It can change you by pushing your limits. I don't mean this in any particularly serious way, but I do mean it. Having our expectations challenged is a part of human growth and development.
There. I turned it up to 11 things about gonzo.
Thursday, July 2, 2015
Wednesday, July 1, 2015
Follow-up from Yesterday's Game Prep Post
After posting my (intentionally) inflammatory post, yesterday, +Adam Muszkiewicz and I had a delightful exchange of ideas. I don't full agree with everything he says, but we are not as far apart as my original post might have made it seem. Also, a clarification. It should be noted (as Adam did) that his original post was directed at hex-crawl gaming, a different issue than (or a specific sub-issue of) game preparation in general. My take was, to be sure, based on ignoring that very true fact.
Adam also agreed to let me post the full exchange. I will do so, and a small rejoinder to his last comment. I left the rest of you guys who commented out, because you just don't matter. Suck it! (I kid, I kid).
And a quick detour, because that's how we roll.
Now, just a quick reply to the last serious comment Adam made:
My point: Sometimes I find that specific details that I think are cool become the resource material that provides the resulting aesthetic that will then be used to generate other details. Then, some of those details recur to the aesthetic frame and change it in subtle or not-so-subtle ways. I work back and forth between them--not always, but pretty regularly.
Another example. I wrote an adventure called "Mysterious Temple of the Serpent God," where I wrote the entire adventure from song titles by the band High on Fire.* One of the songs used was "Frosthammer." The existence of the artifact known as the Frosthammer of Graki Deathstalker was a detail that I used to resolve other things that occurred in that adventure. The significant detail is, for me, one of the things that helps me to develop a coherent aesthetic. That said, I understand that it also can work the other way, and has done so for me, as well.
*Note that this way of generating the adventure was based on using song titles for designing specific encounters, and part of developing the adventure, as such, involved me discovering a specific aesthetic framework based on those encounters. So, detail to aesthetic. That said, the method for generating my encounters might be seen as, itself, an aesthetic. I do not agree that the method is, in itself, an aesthetic, because it lacks content associated with aesthetic frames. I could have used REO Speedwagon to do the same thing. The method would be exactly the same, but the result would have been completely different (one would hope).
Another thing: I like having details in my adventures, even if they don't get explored by the PCs. Here's why. If you've ever played a CRPG like, say, Morrowind, and been frustrated by doors you can't open, or objects you can't manipulate, or NPCs you can't interact with, it creates a sense of futility, for me. It gets to feeling "railroady." Prepping a single location, like Bob the Butcher's shop, and thinking about what kinds of things he has there, and how that that implies what sort of neighborhood it's in, and how that affects the kind of customers he attracts, and what kinds of problems he has, etc., etc. All of those little things give me a better picture of the larger world around Bob. He becomes real and, as a result, the whole world becomes more real. The aesthetic springs from the details of the place just as much as the place is birthed from an aesthetic preference. Good fiction is like that, too: An "insignificant" detail can become the thing that makes the story meaningful for a particular reader. (and yes, I realize that I'm conceding Adam's point that this is something that is "significant" because a PC actually encounters it at the table, for this example). The larger point, though, is that the detail may not get encountered, at all, but it may help me (as a GM) understand the larger aesthetic and produce things that are encountered.
Adam also agreed to let me post the full exchange. I will do so, and a small rejoinder to his last comment. I left the rest of you guys who commented out, because you just don't matter. Suck it! (I kid, I kid).
Reply
Reply
Edit
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And a quick detour, because that's how we roll.
Reply
Now, just a quick reply to the last serious comment Adam made:
I feel like aesthetic coming from specifics rather than becoming the rubric by which to determine what the specifics are is putting the cart before the horse. How can you just come up with these specifics if you don't know where you're drawing your inspiration from for those specifics beforeyou figure out what the specifics are?I think this is the main place where Adam and I part ways in our conception of game prep. I don't see this as an either/or thing. My details usually inform my aesthetic. I get caught up in them as a New Cool Thing (thanks, ADD!) and forget for a moment the overarching theme, at least in part. So, for example, in my thinking about elves (teaser for the upcoming issue of the Metal Gods of Ur-Hadad zine), I started with the iron susceptibility of the DCC elf class and asked, "Why isn't this used?" Then I thought about what it meant, on the level of the specific things that might happen to an elf character if iron susceptibility was taken to a logical conclusion (i.e., like heavy metal poisoning). What would the details of specific NPCs' lives be like if that were a thing, in Ur-Hadad? It would depend on who you were. So, thinking about the details of NPCs I'd like to use for that sort of thing got me thinking about what a society where this was an issue might be like (more of an meta-aesthetic thing). That got me to thinking about conflict in that society based on class divisions, technologies that might be utilized to help the problem, specific game-based effects on player characters and the like. I even started thinking about a detail like a faction leader who resents that a lower-class elf is doomed to horrible death, and becomes a terrorist. Cool details I may never actually use in a game, but which inform the overall feel of the game, and how I might present it to my players.
My point: Sometimes I find that specific details that I think are cool become the resource material that provides the resulting aesthetic that will then be used to generate other details. Then, some of those details recur to the aesthetic frame and change it in subtle or not-so-subtle ways. I work back and forth between them--not always, but pretty regularly.
Another example. I wrote an adventure called "Mysterious Temple of the Serpent God," where I wrote the entire adventure from song titles by the band High on Fire.* One of the songs used was "Frosthammer." The existence of the artifact known as the Frosthammer of Graki Deathstalker was a detail that I used to resolve other things that occurred in that adventure. The significant detail is, for me, one of the things that helps me to develop a coherent aesthetic. That said, I understand that it also can work the other way, and has done so for me, as well.
*Note that this way of generating the adventure was based on using song titles for designing specific encounters, and part of developing the adventure, as such, involved me discovering a specific aesthetic framework based on those encounters. So, detail to aesthetic. That said, the method for generating my encounters might be seen as, itself, an aesthetic. I do not agree that the method is, in itself, an aesthetic, because it lacks content associated with aesthetic frames. I could have used REO Speedwagon to do the same thing. The method would be exactly the same, but the result would have been completely different (one would hope).
Another thing: I like having details in my adventures, even if they don't get explored by the PCs. Here's why. If you've ever played a CRPG like, say, Morrowind, and been frustrated by doors you can't open, or objects you can't manipulate, or NPCs you can't interact with, it creates a sense of futility, for me. It gets to feeling "railroady." Prepping a single location, like Bob the Butcher's shop, and thinking about what kinds of things he has there, and how that that implies what sort of neighborhood it's in, and how that affects the kind of customers he attracts, and what kinds of problems he has, etc., etc. All of those little things give me a better picture of the larger world around Bob. He becomes real and, as a result, the whole world becomes more real. The aesthetic springs from the details of the place just as much as the place is birthed from an aesthetic preference. Good fiction is like that, too: An "insignificant" detail can become the thing that makes the story meaningful for a particular reader. (and yes, I realize that I'm conceding Adam's point that this is something that is "significant" because a PC actually encounters it at the table, for this example). The larger point, though, is that the detail may not get encountered, at all, but it may help me (as a GM) understand the larger aesthetic and produce things that are encountered.
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