Set pieces are interesting locations/events that the characters can interact with during a confrontation with other characters. They can provide obstacles or offer features that the characters can take advantage of during a confrontation. Fate models this nicely with situation aspects. They contribute to story structure by providing a scene - not just setting but a unit of time - where the story can be moved forward.
Story structure in games
To slightly reiterate my point above in different light: structure is important because of the stories we are culturally primed to expect. That’s why prescriptive structure rarely works (or rather, rarely feels inspired or artistic) in either movies or games. Having rules for resolving acts could work in the right mix–like, it might be part of my “next game only 100 people will like” which will be about Modernist drama–but even there you need to have a lot of room for things to work out. Rather, formal understanding of structure is better for sniffing out the shapes of stories and possibly holding–lightly! Very lightly!–things you might want to see happen to pull the story into that arc.
Basically we do this instinctively as humans within our own cultural spheres. It’s easier for some people and harder for others and that’s no shame. Knowing some stuff about structure will maybe make your instincts stronger. Or just watching a lot of stories with good structure. Some of these will be masterpieces (the “Three Colors” trilogy is some of the greatest screenwriting ever) and some will be just good genre movies (“Die Hard” has an unbelievably solid structure that hits all of the important story beats.)
Then after that you can approach games. Like, “Lady Blackbird” has a classic three act structure! I mean, it doesn’t have to get played that way, but there’s a certain gravity to the map, the locations, and the situations** that push it into that kind of a structure.
The other thing is to GM by the clock 
this is something running hundreds of two-hour slots taught me. No cliffhangers, resolve each session with some kind of climax in the last 45 minutes, and maybe do a reveal for next time
*Harmon’s an asshole, but is one of the most serious students of structure in screenwriting today
**Study Cyrus & Natasha’s Keys, note how paying them off makes for a very strong dramatic story, for example. Harper is a genius of stuffing setting into rules.
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Resurrecting this to bring in a focus on the four-act story structure, especially in this Japanese tradition Kishōtenketsu (link below for my source), which purportedly works without conflict — that is, conflict as it’s understood in a classical three-act structure, which hinges on a climax.
What particularly struck me in the context of the Gauntlet is that a four-act structure mirrors our play culture: four session series (usually — if not a quarterly series, which invites a whole other conversation on embedding four-act series within a three-act quarterly 
). A lot of the discussion here focuses on plot structure within a single session, but I wonder if a four-act structure applied to a series would be beneficial.
In Kishōtenketsu, it works like this:
- First Act: Introduction
- Second Act: Development
- Third Act: Twist (complication)
- Fourth Act: Conclusion (reconciliation)
- [Introduction] is self explanatory. It’s where we’re introduced to the story and we get to know the characters taking part and the world they live in.
- Similarly, [development] also doesn’t require much explanation. This is where we get to know the characters a little better. We learn about their relation to each other and their place in the world. This is where we develop an emotional connection to the characters.
- …The twist is where things get a bit complicated. I’ve seen this act referred to as complication, and while I don’t think that’s technically correct, I feel it’s a better name. Calling it a twist brings with it associations to plot-twists as we know them from more traditional western narratives. This isn’t necessarily the case here. It can be, but it doesn’t have to. However, it’s often something unexpected, and usually unrelated to what’s happened in the first two acts.
- Finally, the [conclusion] is about the impact of the third act on the first two acts. This is why I like the term reconciliation [instead]. The third act will affect the situation presented in the first and second act, and in the fourth act the state of the world in first and second act is reconciled with the events of the the third.
I think it’s just an interesting structure at a more macro level than the individual session, which might broaden what a table could expect or execute within a series, without having to sweat climaxes or a constant ebb and flow of action.
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Both the Western and Eastern story structure depends on a single experience: uncertainty. Conflict is uncertainty; introducing a (unrelated) element is uncertainty (where will it go?); rolling dice is uncertainty.
What’s important to understand that Freytag’s dramatic circle (Monomyth, Story Circle, you name it) isn’t just occurring all through the entire arc, but in each act and even in each scene. What I think is wrong is looking and analyzing the end result - the story structure(s) - because that will lock your mind in what uncertainty can be created.
What I think is more fruitful is to look at what engages people: by A) evaluate a situation, B) acting on the situation, C) getting the response from the situation, only to repeat from A again. For books, the mental model is the following: read a situation, imagining the situation, reading further. In other words, it doesn’t have to be an active action, but a passive or reactive one for the engagement model to work.
This model follows the same structure as the story structures: you have it for the whole arc, you have for each act in the arc, and you have it in each scene (situation) of each act. The benefit is that you can extend yourself thinking about different kinds of uncertainty, which is hard to do as a Westerner because we learned that our stories must have conflicts. However, the ground is there to grow from.
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Nobody has cited Directions RPG yet, which follows the premise of PTA (a crew creating a movie) but with mainly dramatic structure and genre navigational tools for rules.
Robin D. Laws’ Hit Points for Hamlet also spring into mind. Mind you, it’s kind of linear, like most of his products.
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For those with an interest in Structure in storygames, a link from SG forum :
The first one that comes to mind is Misspent Youth by Robert Bohl. It has something to encourage rising tension, and it feels like it adds some structure, but it’s a very light touch at the same time. Recommended!
For solo play, the best known tool is The 9 Questions which are a series of prompts.
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