DM: It's a convincing scheme, but I guess it's up to Cadenza. Will Fluttershy's plan work?
Princess Cadance: Oh yes, absolutely. Her read is spot-on.
Shining Armor: Especially if Cadance is starting to get suspicious too.
Princess Cadance: Exactly. She's going to want Twilight's friends where she can keep a close eye on them, much like they want to be closer to her. Especially if they look "excited" at the "opportunity" to be a Princess's bridesmaids. It's a generous bribe! Would an evil Princess let a bunch of commoners join her wedding ceremony? The old bridesmaids will be... relocated.
DM: ...Noted.
Pinkie Pie: Can't wait to rescue them later!
Fluttershy: Oh. Heh heh. Whoops...
Applejack: Big picture, Flutters, big picture.
As much fun as this show looks, I could never watch it because those shots of the ponies from straight on instead of seeing them in profile go right into the uncanny valley for me.
Also tremendous fun to do around your coworkers. It helps to cut down on opportunists who are eyeing your snack stash.
I also wholeheartedly reccomend practicing the evil grin and the evil quiet chuckle. Combining all three at the right moment leaves people wondering if its just light hearted banter or if you're really going to murder them with a letter opener for stealing your chips
I sometimes subvert the trope by being completely sincere, but delivering the line like that so the players think there's a secret meaning. It's a great decoy for whatever the actual secrets are.
I really love how protagonists, antagonist and GM are all working together to tell a story they already know the outlines of. In most cases, the outline of an adventure is a mystery to the players, but the way I first learned, it wasn't.
My first RPG was online, by post, diceless and informal. It was a Star Trek series where everyone played a different department head. And because everything was written in prose, in response to other players' posts, we knew the outline of the story, and even its conclusion, from the start. The writing and characterization were the important thing, and even better was the ability to flesh out our own NPCs and abilities. One game I played in took two months to cover two days worth of plot (and we were all posting almost daily)!
Not to mention that, despite the presence of a GM, the players were allowed and encouraged to work out the specifics themselves. We would know there was a threat down on the planet, but it wasn't until a player decided of their own accord that their character had met a Cardassian, Klingon or Romulan, that we knew what it was. And we avoided contradicting each other's posts, building on them instead to make something no one had expected before we started. It was almost stream-of-consciousness sometimes.
For example, when once I wrote that the first transmission from a mysterious probe was "Mooooo," it expanded into a space-bison story which drew in the Native American PCs of the cast. Let's just say that I tended to gravitate to the comedic groups of the club.
I've found it definitely can be more fun to plan the adventure collaboratively with your players rather than give the players a mystery, though it probably depends on the group. Some people really like surprises and want to try and figure out a mystery, others enjoy enacting a story and playing up the fact that their character doesn't know everything they do.
If you're more focused on the story rather than the destination, it can also make metagaming less fun to do for the players. Sometimes its fun to decide that your characters wouldn't notice a trap that you as a person know about, and have them run straight in to it regardless.
Sometimes your plans put innocent people in harms way on accident, sometimes it's on purpose...
Other times your plan goes so completely off the rails you end up in a perma-burning valley injured from offing a skeletal flaming alicorn(well, Cindermare, it's a elemental in my setting, but physically resembles an alicorn), only to find you and your helpless NPC expert friends cornered by a angry Dragon Turtle(which can leave the water in my setting just fine).
Also your only level freaking EIGHT.
These are the times you apologize to everyone, bust out the Rod of Wonders(and the net library if random magical effects), and hope for the best.
'Nightmare"? I've had several characters who either specialized in or had powers to create collateral damage. It can be a fun way to play some times...