Gonzo versus Player Choice

Some "gonzo" role-playing game products are lots of fun to read as a potential referee. Written especially for GMs, they are just begging to be used in play by presenting all kinds of bizarre places and creatures and objects, but when it comes to actual play, the players don't have nearly as much fun.

I think that some varieties of "gonzo" play-styles and aesthetics have the potential to block player fun as much as they can stimulate a sense of weird wonder.

When a setting is strongly detached from reality, and becomes quite unpredictable, players cannot judge the outcomes of their choices. If you drink from a pool in a subterranean chamber, you might have to save versus poison or die, or you might raise a prime attribute. If there's no way for the players to figure out if something is beneficial or harmful, no clues, then the fun house ceases to be fun. Player choice becomes less meaningful when the effects of actions are not predictable in any way. A weird or psychedelic world may make sense to the GM, but if it seems to players that anything can happen, the game can cease to engage. The GM takes delight, but the players are just experimental guinea pigs wandering in the GM's world.

Combine that with the side-effect that the "gonzo" aesthetic can emphasize the gap between player and character, by appealing to the sense of humor of the player, not the character, it increases the "gamey-ness" of a role-playing game, but it's a game in which there is little fictional rationale for players to make decisions that matter.

In this way, unpredictable gonzo settings can be like the games in which GMs have a cast of powerful NPCs and an ongoing drama of their own, where the players are just witnesses to the cool stuff that the NPCs get to do. Players and their characters matter less.

Examples

From the beginning of the dungeon-delving hobby, traps have been an essential feature. Ingenious GMs dreamed up all kinds of wicked traps. I still have some of the book series Grimtooth's Traps (from 1981) by Flying Buffalo, the producers of Tunnels & Trolls, a game that always remained more "gonzo" in its presentation than early D&D. 

The Grimtooth's Traps books are compendia of sadistic and unpredictable traps to foil dungeon adventurers. You can hear the GM cackling, "Gotcha!" Most of them are confusing to players and likely to maim and kill PCs without warning. It's not clear that anybody would actually put them to use in play, but somebody must have done it.

These books of traps are strongly appealing to GMs as fun tricks, but players learn to be hopeless in a dungeon full of this kind of cruel killer surprise.

The role-playing game Paranoia (1984) was similar. The original game, which I relished running, was work of art as a matter of game design and presentation. The game is brilliant. In actual use, though, players found the hyper-dangerous dystopian world to be one in which their choices were futile. "Gotcha!" moments abounded in the Kafkaesque published modules that I used. That's how the game is designed. Death in Paranoia comes so easily that each PC gets six clones; when a PC dies, the next clone of the same character is somehow air-dropped in. It's perfect for the genre, but in play, it just said to my players that they were pointless, and they resisted playing it further. No wonder. It's a game for GMs, not for players. (In those days, we didn't call games "gonzo," but Paranoia would qualify today.)

A cousin of gonzo is the dreaded horror of Things Man Was Not Meant To Know. Call of Cthulhu (1981) is probably my all-time favorite game, one that I ran perhaps more than any other in the old days. There were many excellent published scenarios. Some of them, though, led players to an overdose of cosmic horror that spoiled things, when they finally confronted a meaningless world in which helplessness was their only option. In one published scenario that I ran, the PCs get a prolonged glimpse of the future of time and space and passing ages unto the collapse of the Universe. This is the climax of the adventure, but in play it devolves into an extended narration by the GM of a vision punctuated by a painfully long series of Sanity checks. The players sat back in their chairs hopelessly as I tried to evoke a mind-blowing revelation, but the weirdness of the cosmic horror left the players with nothing to do but to watch their characters' minds peel away bit by bit. The players checked out while my narration, following the cues of the published module, only became less and less effective as I attempted to increase my zeal to impress them with the cosmic vision. The players were glad when the game was over. Ouch! From the player point of view, it was just sadistic, not horrific. For something to be scary, there has to hope that agency can lead to an escape. This scenario ended with a long elevator ride to nowhere.

Modern gonzo settings and adventures risk this syndrome. The GM is given a delightful and brilliantly illustrated module full of mind-blowing creativity, bizarre, trippy, gonzo encounters to spring on their players, typically with high lethality. It's a fun house. But if the players care about what happens in the game at all, this is going to disappoint them, because they can't possibly guess whether making one choice or another will have any predictable or rational result. It's just, sproing! you're dead. Or,  your body has been transformed! Or, you get something good for no reason! But mostly it's just: you're dead.

You know you are looking at this kind of game when there are special rules for delivering new PCs speedily into the hands of players whose characters just died.

I was looking at the brilliant, big, gorgeous module Operation Unfathomable. This is a delight to read as a prospective GM. I love the look, the presentation, the aesthetic, the ideas. It's just exciting to read. This is the kind of work that makes OSR players boast about "the creativity of the OSR." I think it's great as the original game Paranoia was great. And yet I can't imagine it's lots of fun for most players to enter a gonzo, "random," highly lethal environment that defies all expectations. Most of the reviews gush about how cool it looks (and it does look sensationally cool), but, as is typical in reviews, there is little reflection on its actual use in play. The word "fun" comes up a lot, but how fun was it fun to play, for the players (not for the GM who reports about it)? I found one play report saying basically that the players did not like it because it was too unpredictable--just what I'm talking about here generally. I know it was developed through playtesting, so it must have worked for the designer, but, reportedly, even the designer's "players apparently said no thank you to the terrors of the deep, forcing him to develop the next overland adventure he plans to publish."

There seem to be a lot of RPG products that aim to delight GMs, not players. This fits one purpose of RPG products: to get people to think about how it could be used in play, even if it will never be used.

My point 

If stuff doesn't make sense, and if consequences can't be predicted, players can't make meaningful choices.

There are players who don't mind this. If your players are just killing time, or hanging out with friends, maybe they don't really care what happens. If they are seeking entertainment from their GM friend with weird stuff, perhaps while playing in a chemically altered state of mind, a bizarro adventure trip may also please them. (I've known players like this.)

But if they are playing a game, or seeking a rational story-telling experience, the gonzo aesthetic can undermine enjoyment and fun by undermining the rationality of the players' choices.

In the end it's a matter of tastes in a player group. But there does seem to be a kind of "gonzo" that undermines the principle that player choice is essential to enjoyment. To put it in the misleading currently preferred terms, gonzo effects can be a virtual "railroad," because player choice plays no real role in the game, no more than random emergent adventures produced from a series of tables.