Halloween 3 (Part 3)

There's an important lesson I thought I learned in making Halloween into an RPG, but it was the wrong lesson. I'll get to that but first I need to talk about my approach to making these things:

The process of building a new reroll for me usually starts by watching the movie and writing down questions; lots of questions which are suggested and left unanswered by the movie. Most are mundane: Understanding clearly the timelines, mechanics and motivations that turn the gears of the story, but some are more profound: These are intentional ambiguities at the heart of the story.

Did Leonard kill his wife? Was Deckard a replicant? Was Cobb dreaming? Is there something supernatural about Michael Myers? (In the text of the original 1978 Halloween, which is the only one that's fully canon for us, the sensible interpretation is that there is not. But there is plenty in the framing of the film to suggest that there is something deeper at play, something evil, as Sam Loomis puts it.) All those lovely ambiguities need to be demystified and resolved.

This isn't to say that an RPG story can't have ambiguities just the same as a piece of scripted fiction, but the quandary is that I do not know before I begin which questions will be answered explicitly and which will remain ambiguous, so I need to have the answers (plus even if they're not answered, the answers form the basis of worldbuilding and can influence the story in lots of small ways.)

The interesting point to get out of all this is that what is revealed and what is held back can fundamentally change the nature of a story, and in a piece of improv that's not decided, but arrived at through the action of the plot. In this way the player's actions in what information they learn or miss, can in itself change the genre of a story.

Our little Halloween saga is a perfect example of that. In the original movie, one of the questions I wrote down and underlined was "Where are all the parents?" There was something ominous about their complete absence that evening (Especially in the context of Laurie's panicked run, to find only closed doors.) In watching the movie it almost felt like a mystery in which none of the characters were asking the right question. But without explicitly arriving at that question, Halloween is not a mystery, it's a slasher. When in our version, Laurie had the sense to try to go find her parents, I had to let them in on that question, and suddenly our story had become a bit of a mystery.

This led me to find one of the pitfalls of trying to tell a mystery story in an RPG: There is no guarantee that your players will find their way to any answers (and I refuse to give up answers cheaply.) The result in Halloween 1 was a story that felt slightly lopsided to me: Big suggested questions with no real answers, and no clear sign as to how they played in to the main action of the story. What was worse for me was that the answer that seemed to be hinted at was the loony cult schtick from the Thorn Trilogy of Halloween sequels. (These were certainly drawn from as a source of inspiration, but I had much better backstory in mind.)

The incredible strengths of RPG storytelling come from the collaboration, the forced improvisation due to randomness, and the enforced consistency of character motivation and agency from having separate players for each character. One of the biggest problems in storytelling is that a story feeling surprising is fundamentally at odds with it feeling cohesive. And RPG's solve this for you at the low-low-cost of surrendering authorial intent. The downside: No one really controls the events of the story. I don't at all, I set them up and help them stay in motion. But if I'm doing my job right the only thing I really control is the framing, which is the one tool we have to help make the whole thing feel complete and intentional even if it's not. But that has it's limits. Sometimes it's clear no matter how you spin it that the events we portrayed don't add up to a whole story.

And here we get to the lesson. What I thought I learned is that you should stay away from mysteries because they're not great for an RPG, but that was actually the wrong lesson. Over 105 episodes of this show I've come to believe that an RPG story will always work if you stick to your principles. It's inherent to the format. So how do I reconcile this with the lesson about mysteries?

Well the real lesson of doing Halloween had nothing to do with mysteries. I do believe that no story told honestly through RPG will feel wrong, but that doesn't mean it has to feel finished. The answer was to keep going. And then the sequel got even crazier and felt even more wild and unfinished then the first, and now here we are on the third one and we seem to be rounding into something that looks like it can eventually be called done (Fingers crossed.)

So here is the lesson: If it doesn't feel like it's finished just keep telling it, and stop when it feels right.