I've had a few folks ask about my approach to action scene design, so I'm going to run through an example of the process from one of the games I'm currently running. This scene got used a few months ago so I don't have to worry about spoiling anything for my players.
Backstory
For the last couple of sessions the heroes have had a couple of encounters with familiar villains in the process of carrying out heists with the assistance of a new kind of ally. They were accompanied by these strange biotech-looking monster things, humanoid but very alien looking with malleable, unstable bodies that could stretch and distort or vary their consistency from gooey liquid to nearly stone-hard. The things weren't very durable and got taken out easily enough, but they could duplicate some of the other villains' abilities, letting the bad guys effectively use their nastiest tricks multiple times per round. That was bad enough the first time it happened, but the next time around there were three of the things instead of one.
The players decided that needed attention, and after some investigation they discovered some new player in the "black cape" community was offering the things - which turned out to be called "protoids" (not "purple goo monsters" as the players dubbed them) - for rent as living tools for other villains. They dug further, found that some of the payments involved rare chemicals that were also found in the remains of the defeated protoids (they melt into goo when beaten), traced some of the stuff to a front business and from there to your classic disused warehouse in a mostly-abandoned industrial park. The next session would open with the heroes outside the place, planning a stealthy entrance and search to see what was going on inside.
Budgeting The Scene Elements
So the plan was to do a montage scene for the initial sneak-and-scout, at which point they'd locate the concealed entrance to an underground lab facility that would make a good setting for a (probably climactic) action scene. With that in mind, the first thing was to consider what scene elements I wanted to use.
My group has a theoretical six players, but only three of them always show up and I usually get one or two of the others. I generally plan on four and adjust at the table if it turns out to be more or less. I knew for certain I wanted an environment in play, since the lab would be interesting to do twists for. There was a specific new villain made for the story arc - a sort of super-protoid that would be very different than the "rental" ones they'd seen so far. So that's two elements for sure.
There were also a couple of lieutenants that were the mad scientists responsible for creating the things in the first place. I decided to make them part of the environment twists, along with a mix of weak environment minions to represent plain old human guards and lab workers. The other environment twists would be a mix of action effects and a challenge or two. All that goes under the single environment element, which balances out since they come into play fairly slowly as the scene tracker advances rather than all being active from word one. Environments are also a great tool for the GM to use to tweak danger levels on the fly by choosing twists that will be more or less of an immediate problem for the heroes as needed to keep them feeling threatened but not overwhelmed.
The big boss protoid would also have the ability to spawn some mook protoids with its upgrade, so decided to start the scene with Hx2 of them, using up another two elements worth of choices. That covers a four-player table, so job done. If need be I could just drop H minions to fit three players, and if five or six turned up I could add one or two of the "rental" protoids they'd fought before, who could imitate some of the boss protoid's more potent abilities to good effect but were a known factor and would likely get focused own fast.
What Produces Urgency?
The scene tracker itself bears a little consideration too. Why is the scene on a clock, and what happens if it runs out before the heroes triumph - and what does that triumph consist of? Here it would represent the fact that the big protoid is starting to become fully awake and get out of its creators' control. If the tracker runs out without it being defeated it will break out of the lab, collapsing the place behind it and going on a rampage while the heroes dig themselves out and presumably head off to try to stop it. The heroes "win" the scene by defeating the boss protoid before the scene ends, although capturing as many of the lab's occupants while they're at it would be a plus. Depending on who was left standing when the big critter goes down I might just handwave the rest of it, or I might let it play out with the remaining baddies trying to escape.
It's just a coincidence that this is all happening just as the heroes enter the place, honest.
Location, Location, Location
Going by just the rulebook advice I'd be done (beyond writing all this stuff up, anyway), but there's another factor it kind of glosses over. Environments are all very well and good, but there's more to a good setting than just their dice and twists. I still needed to think about what the layout of the lab would be like, both in terms of narrative descriptions and in mechanical terms, how many discrete locations I wanted to divide it into. We play pretty abstract, with locations in a scene usually just written on index cards and laid out on the table, so I didn't need an elaborate grid map.
Past experience tells me that an ideal setting has a number of locations that ranges from H-2 to H+2 (with a minimum of at least two) or there's not much point in even talking about them. With less than that the heroes can't spread out much even if they want to (which makes them more vulnerable to some effects that hit all nearby targets) and don't have many movement options, and more than that will probably leave some locations unused, especially if the heroes are busy dealing with a lot of challenges or otherwise facing action economy pressures. It's also worth thinking about what types of mobility tricks might make movement between locations easier, or if some locations are physically close enough not to require an action to move between, making the division between them mostly have effects on combat actions and Overcomes.
And that's all there is to the planning stage of things. I'll stick the mechanical end of things in a follow-up post tomorrow so you can see the finished writeups for everything.
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