At least for my part, I'm not saying that gonzo spells & combat combined with gritty skills must be a problem. But I agree with sheadunne that it means that skills will tend to get crowded out or overshadowed over time. Whether or not that's a problem is a matter of taste, but as I've said I don't personally understand the aesthetic of gonzo combat and spells + gritty skills. I don't see what it adds in terms of verisimilitude, fantasy tropes, ease of play, immersion, or any of the other standard aesthetic criteria for fantasy RPG.
Just picking this as a good paragraph to drop in my thoughts.
I've noticed the gritty/gonzo problem quite a bit. Its one of the things that keeps most of my campaigns relatively low level. I think basically it comes down to a fundamental problem with the D&D way of doing things (perhaps leaning on Sim too much). In particular, looking at the fiction, movies, etc....gonzo-ness (gonzocity?) seems to correlate with narrative causality (as Terry Pratchett would put it) rather than anything akin to "realism". Supers being the prime example of high-gonzocity and...well I guess history books being the low end? I think that's important, because you
need narrative motivations and the like to reign in the gonzo stuff: "Why doesn't Superman just <do X>?"
IME, the rules that handle truly gonzo stuff well are almost all very lightweight and narrative compared to D&D. Can it be detailed and full of fluff and fiddly bits? Maybe, I'm not sure. There are two mechanical functions that the best (IMO) gonzo-handling games have, and that D&D lacks:
The first is some narrative motivational driver beyond just "whatever the player wants at this very moment" or "more loots". Some hook, driver, or limiter to answer "Why doesn't Gandalf just <do X>?" This doesn't have to be very rigidly structured and at least (basic) FATE let's you avoid it depending on your choices for aspects. Capes, on the other hand, dictates the format of the sentence that describes your heroes motivations. (
I love Mary
, but being seen with her puts her in danger!)
The second is a unified free-form method for generating narrative tags with mechanical impact. By socketing skills, powers, and whatever else into that system, you can get a handle on all of them at once. This is the one that may limit the rules to being lightweight, because having this really cuts down on the need for things like power lists. Again, Capes and FATE are at the opposite ends (AFAIK). FATE has explicit rules for creating and using temporary aspects which involves them in the FATE point economy of the game. Capes does it implicitly by making the fiction players generate non-negotiable (In Capes, if she said it, it happened. Although there are rules limiting
what you can say.) MHRP does it too, in very FATE-like fashion: called Assets, Complications, Stunts, or Resources depending on how you create them.*
So D&D fancies that it will take you from zero to hero over the course of your career, cranking up gonzocity as you go....I think that's a very hard task for any set of rules. D&D (3e is the poster child and 4e the outlier) starts you out (in terms of mechanical weight) barely better than the farmhand off the field. Therefore at the start, mundane skills and their functioning is fixed so that these characters have a chance of doing
something. Even without a skill system, consider how much early-level old-school games revolve around character/player cleverness, rather than their mechanical abilities. But then you've got a very un-gonzo mechanic set up. How to add gonzocity? D&D does it by adding less
non-negotiable scripted gonzo elements (most often called spells.) Slowly transferring bits of narrative authority to the players (at least the spellcaster players). However, gonzocity starts to run wild with the rest of the game (still structured around the early non-gonzo levels) and thus...LFQW
and @pemerton's issues above. Of course, as he mentions, this is also something of a taste issue, and others won't think twice about it.
*Since I've prattled on about them, I should say that FATE can handle almost any degree of gonzocity with just a few easy tweaks. MHRP uses a rather odd system called Cortex Plus, which seems to be fairly flexible as well, but requires (I think) more effort to bang it into odd shapes. However, those shapes seem to be capable of directly reflecting certain narrative formats (Leverage, for example.) Capes (a little-known indie game) handles gonzo supers very well. Even though it might work mechanically, I can't imagine trying to handle a low-gonzocity setting with it. One of its design premises is "You've got power, do you deserve it?" and it does well with making that central. Hardly an issue when the characters don't actually have power. Could easily see it doing mythology-style stories, though.