The Four Act Structure

I've been reading through a lot of the published Firefly adventures recently, and I was struck by something in the structure - they all have exactly four acts. It took me a while to realise this, as I'd expected some to have three, some five, or whatever; or perhaps for the number of acts to vary with the length of the adventure. But, no. Four acts it is; no more, no less.

Now, I was of course familiar with the 'classical' five-act structure: introduction, rising action, climax, falling action, denouement. And I was equally familiar with the compression of this into the three-act structure (where the falling action is compressed to the "final scare" and the denouement is almost non-existent). But I hadn't encountered a four act structure before.

(Incidentally, how come I had to learn all this from reading JMS talking about crafting "Babylon 5"? Why wasn't this covered in English at High School, even at CSYS level?)

I therefore did some investigation and found out what was going on. For obvious reasons, the three-act structure can also be described as "beginning-middle-end". However, the problem with this in terms of movies or TV shows is that the beginning and the end are usually quite short and self-contained, while the middle is extremely long. Therefore, it is common to define a mid-point in the story, and thus split the "middle" into two acts, thus giving beginning-mid-dle-end. Perhaps more importantly, though, it's important that this mid-point has some sort of meaning - that is, the second act "mid" should be somehow different from the third act "dle", in terms of what is happening, or of tone, or whatever.

(Not coincidentally, American TV shows are structured so that the ad breaks fall between the acts. Or, at least, they should be.)

What this means, as far as story goes, is that we have something like this:

• Pre-credits: Introduction, and "inciting incident"
• Credits, and ad break.
• Act One: Immediate reaction to "inciting incident". Statement of the problem.
• Ad break
• Act Two: Attempt to fix the problem. Doesn't work. Add complication.
• Ad break
• Act Three: Second attempt to fix the problem. Partial success. Raise the stakes.
• Ad break
• Act Four: Completion of the solution.
• Ad break
• Denouement: All wrapped up nicely. Coincidentally in 42 minutes. Huzzah!
• End Credits

Of course, that's not an absolute template, or TV would be incredibly dull. But it's pretty good.

What this means in terms of RPGs, and especially for something like the Firefly RPG (which deliberately models itself on a TV show) is that a session can be structured into four distinct parts. Each part should be 'about' something, probably representing a distinct step in solving the 'problem' of the session, coming naturally to a climax in Act Four. Plus, it's useful for pacing purposes - if you have 3 hours in the session, each Act should be about 35 minutes long; if you have 5 hours, each act can stretch to 65 minutes. (Plus 10 mins each for Introduction and Denouement; and a few minutes for breaks, waiting for late players, and general goofing around.)

(This of course needs to be flexible. But that goes without saying.)

Unfortunately, defining all that's the easy bit. Somewhat harder will be populating the various tags as required for the "Firefly: Inglorious" game in a few weeks.