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The three-act story is a writing model. The story is divided into three parts, each with definitive transitions.
Act one: Everything is fine. The characters are introduced, and their world is introduced. This is their everyday life. It's not necessarily pleasant, but it's just how they've lived their lives until the events depicted. Act one ends with an incident, putting the events of the story into motion. This is anywhere from mom running out of sugar, to a large-scale nuclear exchange. Or both.
Act two: The protagonist(s) has/have been drawn into the central conflict, from which there can be no return*. Times get tough, etc etc. This is where 90% of character development happens. Either someone is stripped down to their very base character, or they're built up into something better. Or they just get progressively bigger guns, as with any FPS.
Act three: The conflict, introduced at the end of act one, is resolved. Armed with sugar for mom's cookies, and a self-aiming personality-enhanced emplaced weapon (hey, guess what I'm putting in Sunburn 2?), they... do whatever it is they set out to do in the beginning. After a suitably thrilling climax (pull out all the stops, guys), the falling action takes place. The protagonist(s), with his/her/its/their/our character development mostly locked in, ride off into the sunset. Roll credits.
*Some disagreement with Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces. More on this one later.
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Now, what am I getting at? Think of the last video game you played, or movie you watched. How much time was spent on act one? Five minutes? Five seconds? Was it just thrown at you?
This also comes up in tabletop RPGs, and even in a lot of the RPs I do with friends. Nothing against them, but very few (especially mine, I'm really bad at this) have no act one. There's no time to get in sync with your characters. A remedy appeared to me in the form of- yeah, I know- Fallout 3.
Fallout: New Vegas doesn't have act one. None whatsoever. Spoilers, connect the dots at your own risk.
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Apparently you detonated a nuke in the middle of a city once.
Just thought you should know.
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Fallout 3, however, gives you one through gameplay. It shows your character through various periods of their life. Escaping the play pen as a baby, your tenth birthday, and dealing with some bullies in underground nuclear shelter high-school. For about five to twenty minutes, you wonder if you got the wrong game. Then, you wake up (expecting a nice day of reading, for example) and find out act two has started. It was a brilliant piece of work, and highly immersive until the pop-up at the very end.
So, where's the application?
For Spectrum, I've been considering implementing something similar. It'll be less personal because it's four people, but I have faith in it as a creation concept. It's a little bit Freudian in a way, but I'm never one to pass up an excuse to foreshadow a LOT of things. Virtually every second of the "childhood" segment is going to be referencing something from an RP, or something they'll see as adults. I was considering not even telling the players they were making characters, and just assigning stat choices to various actions. But that seems out of place, and I want the players to have definitive knowledge of what they're getting into. For now.
It's a really great way to put a character from concept to paper, and it will give the characters a good reason to be very familiar with each other. And, only just now I realize Sunburn has no act one. Bad GM, no dice for you.
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