The most visible episode of a gongde is the rescue from the underworld. In its common forms the officiant assaults a constructed fortress, made of paper or of a tiled arrangement on the floor, in which the soul is held; or leads the family across a bridge set up in the ritual space, carrying the tablet of the dead. The mourners take part rather than watch. The set is built for the occasion and destroyed in the course of it, and the destruction is the point: something is being got out of somewhere.
The service admits of very different scales. A modest household may engage a small group of priests for one night. A wealthy one may commission several days, with a full complement of officiants, musicians, and elaborate constructions, and the difference is publicly legible to everyone attending. That visibility is part of the institution rather than a corruption of it: funerary expenditure has been a recognised way of stating a family's standing in Chinese society for a very long time, and reformers from the imperial period onward have complained about it in almost identical terms across the centuries.
Regional variation is wide. The liturgy differs between the Zhengyi priests of the south, who marry and live among the communities they serve, and other lineages; local traditions have their own sequences, their own musical settings, and their own names for the same episodes. What is constant is the bureaucratic frame and the paid, professional character of the officiant, who is a specialist engaged for the work rather than a congregational leader.