Recently I have been reading the Leverage RPG core book by Margaret Weis Productions, which uses the very narrative-focused Cortex Plus system. It's the ideal system for running capers and heists that play out like an episode of a television show. One of the more useful nuggets of insight that I gleaned from my reading was the idea of dividing gameplay up into dramatic 'beats.'
This doesn't mean you need to structure your game with mechanical precision. Rather, it's a way of thinking about the action playing out before you that allows you to organically develop scenes in a way that avoids complication or confusion. It's a way to build a mental flowchart on the fly, and ask yourself "what needs to happen next?"
A dramatic beat represents a single in-game occurrence and its consequences. It could be a single action undertaken by a character, or a number of related actions. The point is that it has a cause and effect that can be described and played out in a few moments... like a thief setting off a secruity system while trying to crack a safe. The next beat might be either an escape attempt, or a fight with the local guards. It's all about marking out each event and set the stakes for the next one.
Thinking like this can be useful in any game system, really. Sometimes it can be difficult to run a game when you don't know what your players are going to do next. You find yourself trying to think several minutes ahead, like a chess grandmaster, in an attempt to develop the adventure toward some exciting conclusion. By thinking in beats, you are separating the action into a series of moves, just like on the chessboard. This allows you to focus on the next move coming up, rather than having to plan six moves ahead. You are simply saying to yourself, "Once they complete action X, then Y will happen."
When you break it down like this, even fight scenes can be charted out with this method. In a fight with an ogre, a series of beats might be...
Rondar the Warrior attacks the ogre several times, driving it back to a precipice.
The ogre grapples with Rondar, but he pulls away just in time.
Rondar bull rushes the ogre, knocking him off the cliff!
This is a way that you can delineate the action and establish the cause and effect for segments of this conflict. The three beats could each include more than one attack and action, but they each represented a change in the nature of the fight... moving to the cliff, the ogre trying to toss the warrior over the edge, the warrior victorious. So when the DM is running this fight, rather than looking at the big picture, they are taking it beat by beat... the ogre wants to throw the warrior, the ogre is endangered by the cliff. And when something is getting boring, they simply decide on the next dramatic beat (Such as "The ogre calls for his orc reinforcements") and move from there.
If there are more than one characters with different goals, those can be represented by multiple dramatic beats, and you can 'edit' the scene to cut back and forth between their actions dramatically, spotlighting each character in turn. The more simply you can define a beat, the easier it is for you to know how to manage it by calling for dice rolls and making judgement calls as the DM.
Each dramatic beat leads into the next, so the process is as simple as step one, step two, step three. At its core this simplifies the game into building blocks, providing a clear direction for each moment of your campaign. I'm going to keep this method in mind the next time I run a game. I hope this, or a similar technique, will prove useful to you in your own campaigns.
Happy ventures!
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