A situation's type is the flavor of its entertainment value. This is how you expect the players to interact with each other. I've identified five types here, but each game's genre (and the group's preferences) should dictate the play-styles.

When planning a situation, identifying the type is a good place to start for planning the situation and organizing the situations within the plot. By viewing the list of your session's situation types, you can start to get an idea of what the experience of the session will be like.

During the session, the game master's attention should be on the players. By being aware of how they're reacting to the game, the game master can tailor the prepared script to match what the players want as they want it. For these reasons, it's a good idea to plan both ways to end a situation early as well as ways of extending it.