End Involvement Complaints Forever

 

Its pretty much universal to MUSH that admin who try to run tinyplots run up against players who complain that nobody has tried to involve them in tinyplots, or that only a select few friends of the admin get to be involved.

 

As an admin who runs tinyplots I've certainly tried for more involvement, and not less, but the rumors always persisted until I created a tool that could quantifiably demonstrate to my players not only who was getting involved, but what constituted involvement and why the people who were involved were involved.  My tool tells them exactly how many people are involved, across what spread of IC profession, and how many scenes are plot related, along with giving a brief synopsis of the scene that helps them keep up and, hopefully, generates more ideas through which they may become involved.

 

That tool is the Tinyplot Tracker.

 

You can place your tinyplot tracker anywhere that players will have access to it.  For my purposes I found it was easiest to do so on my personal LJ, filtered to avoid spamming. I put up a bbpost and asked players to subscribe to the tracker, so that only the interested could have a look at it.  I then formatted it thusly:

 

TinyPlot Tracking
(Name)

(Type -- for example, Global)

Full Participant List To Date: (Here I placed the name of each participant)
Total Participants So Far: (Here you place the count of each participant. You are going for alts, not players. You don't care who plays what. You're drawing in alt involvement. If you're running any kind of involved TP you are going to need all sorts of characters, and it doesn't matter if your best friend plays 3 alts, 1 of them will be of a type you can't use and you'll need 10 other alts of a type you can, from other players).
 
Notes: A participant counts as anyone who has been in 1 or more plot related scenes.
An invite is someone who I have either directly @mailed or asked Participant to contact for RP. (This is a note I place on every TP tracker).

Participant Occupations:
 
Total Number of Major Events -
Total Number of Small Scenes -
Total Number of Scenes:

Scene: Scene by scene, I begin describing each scene and who participated. As I update the tinyplot tracker I put the previous scenes under an LJ cut and leave the newer scenes in the body of the post.

 

To demonstrate how this might work I will use the example of the kidnapping tinyplot from "Plots that Shine, Part I". (Someday, I'll even get around to writing the other Parts).

 

TinyPlot Tracking
Kidnapping Plot
Medium Scale Tinyplot

Full Participant List To Date: Alan, Marcus, Charlotte, Brad, Nadia, Zoe, Shelly, Lauren, Carson, Luke, Paul, Maria, Raul, Trevor, Haggerty, Yvette, Quinn, Erik, Hailey, William

Total Participants So Far: 20

 

Notes: A participant counts as anyone who has been in 1 or more plot related scenes.
An invite is someone who I have either directly @mailed or asked Participant to contact for RP.

Participant Occupations:
Businessmen/women - 2

Criminals - 1

Law Enforcement - 2

Students - 4

Lawyers or Legal Affiliate - 2

Media - 2

Average Joes - 4

Politicians - 1

Medical - 2

Total Number of Major Events -
Total Number of Small Scenes - 7
Total Number of Scenes: 7

Scene: Alan the Insurance Adjuster has proof that Marcus the Slum Lord is burning down tenement buildings for the insurance money.  He gets the proof, puts it in a safe deposit box, and is about to go to Charlotte the Police Officer when Marcus the Slum Lord calls his cell phone.  Marcus the Slum Lord has kidnapped
Brad, the Son.  This particular scene is unlikely to change simply because it's the hook, though other players may be there to witness it.  He takes the call and he chickens out, he has a nervous lunch with Charlotte but doesn't tell her about the proof…or the kidnapping, as he's been warned off of it by Marcus.  Of course, Charlotte figures out something is up. They've known each other a long time, so she asks some casual questions, and, following a hunch, she makes a show
of arresting Alan.  

Scene: Nadia the prosecution lawyer makes vague reference to the case in a bar, and Zoe the Reporter gets wind of it.

 

Scene: Shelly, Lauren, and Carter all go picket the jail.  Luke the DA makes a statement.

 

Scene: Alan finds himself released.  Now Alan's out and Marcus is on the old cell phone again, aware he may be running out of time, demanding that

Alan get to his safe deposit box and get that proof and bring it to him.  But Alan can't even get a moment alone.  There's Zoe, and Paul the journalist, harassing him with questions he doesn't want to answer all the way to his car.  But eventually he does get to the bank…

 

Scene: Marcus threatens Brad while Brad begs to be set free.

 

Scene: Only to find that Maria, his wife, cleaned out the safe deposit box this morning, disk and all, and filed for divorce so she could run off with Raul, the pool boy (players thirteen, fourteen, and fifteen counting the Loan Officer, Trevor).  Trevor is dreadfully sorry but at the time she had a legal right to that box.  Alan frantically calls Marcus and says he needs more time, and Marcus decides to give it to him…but pages Alan to say that at this point he'd feel the need to
move Brad because he knows something was phony about the arrest.

 

Scene: Charlotte and her partner Haggerty arrive at the apartment only to find it bombed. Before the bomb squad can get there the bomb goes off.  Yvette and Quinn, tenants at the complex, are caught in the blast.

 

Scene: Eric the EMT shows up with his NPC partner and whisks the five of them to the hospital to get fixed up by Hailey the Doctor.  Zoe and Paul show up to cover this story too, not even aware they sort of caused the thing.  William the Mayor stands up and gives a statement about the bombing that may or may not be so much crap.

 

And so forth. There's no major events yet, because I define a major event as an event which one posts on the bbpost: ANYONE WELCOME! BIG PLOT EVENT AT TIMES SQUARE! or wherever, with date and time.

 

When you post these up where anyone can keep track, not only will you find that more people work to get actively involved in the plot because they know who to page for RP to go to about it and what's going on, but players will virtually stop getting on you about who gets involved. First of all, they'll see that who is involved is a logical progression. They'll see that each scene does not necessarily involve what would seem like the only real 4 major players -- Charlotte, Brad, Marcus, and Alan.  If you are hearing complaints like "I have to play law enforcement, there's no other way to get in on the action," you can prove them wrong just by quietly proving how many Average Joe characters are in your plot.  And because the placement of each character in the plot makes infinite sense, and because several of the scenes, such as the picket, are open in such a way that nobody can possibly say they were excluded from it by anything other than their own RL or choice, you are likely to hear a lot fewer complaints, not to mention being able to gather some statistics on who is getting involved in what, and how people are most commonly being involved.

 

If you have a subscription based tracker it is also a good idea to, when the plot is finished, cut and paste the whole thing into a public forum such as the MUSH LJ or the Yahoogroup or listserv or whatever method your MUSH uses to keep everyone informed.  This means that even those players that don't subscribe can see the way the entire plot unfolded and who got involved, and by that time it will be painfully obvious that who was in the plot had nothing to do with who the wizards like.