TinyPlots: Adam's Guidelines for Player Run TPs
From FiranMUX
These are my suggestions for running a successful TinyPlot.
Smaller is Better
Especially your first time, you're gonna be tempted to run the players all over Aerval, have them interact with Giants and Shamibelians and Lanesh and Talking Dragons, and have the balance of the world rest in their hands. Don't. Keep things simple. Keep them local.
Avoid any idea that requires much wizard intervention. If you need new objects, new rooms, @teleporting, or anything else requiring a wizard, you're creating work for the wizstaff. Remember, the idea was to help us by taking work off our hands. I'm not saying never ask for these things, but realize that we're going to weigh the perceived player fun against the perceived wizard work. We might say no to the whole TP just because it looks work-intensive.
Meaningful Conflict
A good TP presents a problem or dilemma to the characters and demands a simple solution. Do not railroad the players. Give them one or more "decision points" that are interesting and meaningful no matter what they choose. Decisions should lead to new situations, not dead ends. For example:
Meaningful: An Old City outcast needs your help. If you say yes, he will give you information about an imminent evil plot of a Shamibelian slave trade organization within the city but your reputation may suffer. If you say no, your reputation will be clean but the slave traders will do terrible things and it will be on your conscience!
Meaningless: An Old City outcast attacks you. If you kill him, he'll be dead (dead end). If you don't, he might kill you (dead end). You might capture him and try to make him talk (might lead to cool situations, might not).
The second situation presents no moral choice. Do you defend yourself or not? Duh, of course you do. The first situation presents a gray moral choice: help a bad person do something shady and help the greater good, or refuse to take part in any kind of wrongdoing and allow evil to continue. Of course, you could capture him and torture him, too, which is another kind of moral choice. In any case, each player gets to weigh in about their own moral choices and show their true character. The best dilemmas trigger different reactions among involved players and spark role-playing among them!
Situations, not Stories
Players will often do the unexpected. Do not write a story. Stories are what players create. You're creating a situation and seeing what happens. If you know what's "supposed to happen" before the players are involved, you've taken away a lot of meaningful input from the people you're supposed to GM for.
Instead, think through what the players might do and plan some contingencies. Be ready to throw all that away when they players do something else entirely. You'll have to think fast on your feet.
A good tool for creating situations instead of stories is a relationship map. A relationship map is a diagram that shows the main characters in your plot and how they're interrelated. This is usually the NPCs, but PCs could be on here, too. Write each character's name on a piece of paper and draw lines (or arrows) between the ones who have relationships. Write a word or two to describe that relationship: "bastard son," "he hates her," "bodyguard of..." and so on. This is information that the players will have fun discovering through role-play.
Understand what your NPCs want -- in the big picture, but also what they want from the PCs. Corigen the Black's main goal might be to kill his stepmother, the head of the White Dove, because she abandoned him and made him a bastard. What he wants from the PCs, though, is to distract the bodyguard at the Dove for an hour while he does the evil deed.
Consequences
The trick to creating situations in advance is realizing that the players might not care. It's hard to create a situation that universally draws players into the plot. That's why it's important to set things up so that they're interesting even if the players yawn and do something else. Then you ratchet up the consequences of them doing nothing and see if they react to that. Start putting more pressure on them and give them another, different choice. Consequence is how the world changes because of the character's (really, the player's) choices.
Don't use consequences to teach players a lesson. Remember, it might be great fun for a player to have his character make the "wrong" choices. Feel free to teach characters a lesson though!
See Also: How to Run a TinyPlot
