How much Gonzo do you like in your D&D? THE POLL!

[Tony Vargas]

It was so tempting to vote for The Prisoner reference.

1. Consider GONZO to be anything beyond the normal D&D fantasy tropes (however you construe them). Maybe planar adventures to Boot Hill and Gamma World (for you old school people). Maybe a little sci-fi mixed in. Maybe you bend the rules until the break. Feel free to explain what GONZO means to you, even if it's just an annoying blue muppet.

Hey, that's 'The Great' Gonzo!

The normal D&D fantasy tropes are a little gonzo to begin with, anyway.
But, yeah, my current campaign has had lots of planar-hopping, including to historical periods and setting of other games, entirely (the Old World of Darkness, c1993, at the moment, for instance).

Let the inaccurate polling based on a biased sample size begin!

Selection. Size isn't... y'know, nevermind...

 

[lowkey13]

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[Beleriphon]

So, I figure standard D&D relies in gneal on the rules and assumptions of the PHB, MM, and DMG. Settings and supplements expand on those core assumptions, sometimes a lot sometimes a little, but they rarely kick them to the curb.

The more curb kicking of assumptions the more gonzo it gets. Wizards, the animated feature, uses the epic adventure tropes but if it were a D&D game skips a good half of the assumptions about what D&D looks like and does. It's gonzo, both in a D&D sense and as an artistic product.

If your D&D games looks like anything that Ralph Bakshi (other than his LotR) could produce, its gonzo.

 

[Shiroiken]

Probably would have been better on a scale. I'm mostly traditional, but I like Greyhawk... with the infamous Barrier Peaks and mysterious City of the Gods. A little twist can be a good thing, but I'm not a big fan of crazy gonzo.

 

[Charlaquin]

(the Old World of Darkness, c1993, at the moment, for instance).

Old/Classic World of Darkness is just called World of Darkness again, ever since Paradox bought the IP and the name White Wolf from Crowd Control. The IP formerly known as (new) World of Darkness is called Chronicles of Darkness now.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Old/Classic World of Darkness is just called World of Darkness again, ever since Paradox bought the IP and the name White Wolf from Crowd Control. The IP formerly known as (new) World of Darkness is called Chronicles of Darkness now.

WoD and CoD?

...OK...

 

[lowkey13]

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[Charlaquin]

WoD and CoD?

...OK...

Yeah. Although a lot of people abbreviate it as ChroD or CofD to avoid confusion with Call of Duty.

Also, the Paradox subsidiary White Wolf is a brand new company made up of none of the people from the original White Wolf. Some of those folks went on to form Onyx Path, who do most of the publishing of both IPs. Pretty much everything about the behind the scenes of those games is a confusing mess to anyone who doesn’t follow it very closely.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Pretty much everything about the behind the scenes of those games is a confusing mess to anyone who doesn’t follow it very closely.

Sometimes, life imitates art.

 

[Celebrim]

As a general rule, for D&D, as it is for almost all things, people think that the amount of freedom/weirdness/kink/gonzo/whatever that they like is the right amount, and the amount someone else likes is probably too much.

In the case of gonzo in D&D, I'm not even sure how much I like. All I can tell you is how much I'm used to.

In the other cases, I consider freedom to be unlike the rest, in that if you have it, what someone thinks about what you like isn't really relevant. They may be right. They may be wrong. But you can find that out for yourself.

So as long as someone isn't forcing gonzo down my throat or watching with a stick to make sure I'm not off the path, I'm usually pretty good. And really, nothing you've brought up - not roaming in the desert on giant beetles, not giant space hamsters, not trains running on magically electrified rails, not mutant telepathic cactus, not grim gunslingers in the dragon wastes, or any of that sort of thing really strikes me as 'weird' and only some of it strikes me as 'gonzo'. For me it's less about that sort of stuff being too far out for me, than it is about the fact that one campaign can take 3 or 4 thousand hours of play, and I only have time to explore a certain amount of stuff.