Ruben Padilla’s framework, as Pete McCabe presents it in Scripting Magic 2, is built on a simple premise: the audience needs three things to be fully engaged. They need to identify with you. They need to be interested in what you are doing. And they need to feel involved in the experience. Three I’s: Identification, Interest, Involvement.
But the three I’s are goals, not tools. Padilla’s real contribution is identifying six specific qualities — six legs — that create those three states. The six legs are: Jeopardy, Empathy, Likability, Authority, Affinity, and Exclusivity. When all six are present, the audience is fully engaged. When one or more are missing, something feels wrong, even if neither you nor the audience can pinpoint what.
The framework operates as a diagnostic tool. When a script is not working, you do not need to rewrite the whole thing. You check which legs are missing and strengthen those. The fix is targeted, not wholesale.
I discovered this framework during a period when I was struggling with two routines in my show. Both routines were technically solid. Both had clear effects and clean methods. Both had been scripted with care. And both consistently generated weaker reactions than the rest of the show. I could not figure out why. They should have worked. They had everything the other routines had — or so I thought.
Padilla’s six legs showed me exactly what they were missing.
Leg One: Jeopardy
Jeopardy means something is at risk. Not mortal danger. Consequence. The audience needs to feel that the outcome matters — that success and failure are both possible and that which one occurs will mean something.
Jeopardy is the easiest leg to understand and the easiest to underestimate. Most magic routines have an implied jeopardy: will the trick work? But implied jeopardy is weak. The audience knows the trick will work because they are watching a professional who would not perform a trick they could not do. The jeopardy is theoretical, not felt.
Strong jeopardy is personal, specific, and believable. It is not “will the trick work?” but “will this specific thing I’ve promised actually happen, given these specific conditions that make it genuinely uncertain?” When I restructured my routines to include personal stakes — moments where my reputation, my credibility, or my connection with a specific audience member was on the line — the reactions intensified because the audience had something to worry about.
One of my two weak routines had almost no jeopardy. It was a demonstration of a psychological principle, cleanly executed, with no uncertainty and no stakes. The audience watched with intellectual interest and zero emotional investment. There was nothing at risk. Nothing to root for. Nothing to fear. The routine was a lecture with a visual aid, not a performance.
Leg Two: Empathy
Empathy means the audience feels for you. They understand your emotional experience and share in it. They are not just observing — they are co-experiencing.
Empathy is created through emotional honesty. When you let the audience see that something matters to you — genuinely, not performatively — they feel the same emotion. When you are nervous, they feel nervous for you. When you are delighted by an unexpected outcome, they share the delight. When you are moved by a moment of connection with a spectator, they are moved too.
The challenge is that empathy requires vulnerability, and vulnerability is terrifying on stage. It is much easier to maintain a professional facade — competent, controlled, unflustered — than to let the audience see genuine emotional stakes. But the facade blocks empathy. If you appear unaffected, the audience has nothing to empathize with. They admire you but do not feel with you.
I had been blocking empathy with competence. My persona — the calm, analytical strategy consultant — projected capability, not emotion. The audience could see that I was good at what I was doing, but they could not see that it mattered to me. And if it did not appear to matter to me, why would it matter to them?
Fixing this required small but significant shifts. Moments where I paused and let the audience see genuine pleasure at an outcome. Moments where I acknowledged uncertainty honestly instead of glossing over it with professional smoothness. Moments where I shared, briefly and authentically, why this particular piece of magic fascinated me when I first encountered it. These moments were not dramatic. They were human. And they opened a channel of empathy that my previous professional facade had closed.
Leg Three: Likability
Likability means the audience wants you to succeed. They are on your side. They are rooting for you, not evaluating you.
This is distinct from admiration. An audience can admire a performer they do not particularly like. They can acknowledge skill without warmth. They can be impressed without being invested. Likability is what transforms observation into partnership. When the audience likes you, they participate more freely, they forgive more readily, they react more generously.
Likability is built through warmth, respect, and self-awareness. Warmth means you care about the audience, not just about your performance. Respect means you treat volunteers with dignity and the audience with intelligence. Self-awareness means you can acknowledge your own foibles without collapsing into self-deprecation.
I was fortunate here. My natural communication style — engaged, interested in other people, inclined toward self-aware humor rather than arrogance — generated reasonable likability. But I noticed that I was sometimes undermining likability by being too professional. In the corporate context where I usually perform, there is a fine line between polished and distant. When I leaned too far toward polished, the audience perceived formality rather than warmth, and likability suffered.
The fix was to be messier. Not incompetent. Human. To let the audience see the imperfect human behind the polished performer. A stumbled word left uncorrected. A genuine laugh at something a spectator said. A moment of unscripted conversation that broke the fourth wall. These small departures from professionalism increased likability more than any amount of charm or humor could.
Leg Four: Authority
Authority means the audience trusts you. They believe you know what you are doing. They believe you have the expertise and experience to deliver on the implicit promise of the performance.
Authority might seem like the opposite of vulnerability, but it is not. Authority is the baseline of competence that makes vulnerability possible. Without authority, vulnerability looks like incompetence. With authority, vulnerability looks like honesty. The audience needs to trust that you can do this before they can be moved by your willingness to risk failing.
Authority was one of my stronger legs, and it came from an unexpected source: my consulting career. Walking on stage with the bearing and communication skills of someone who has presented to boardrooms for fifteen years creates an immediate impression of authority. The audience does not know why they trust me, but they do, because the physical signals of authority — posture, eye contact, vocal confidence, spatial comfort — are deeply wired.
But authority must be maintained, not just established. Every moment where I fumbled a transition, lost my place in the script, or appeared uncertain about what came next eroded the authority that my bearing had established. I learned that authority is a bank account: you make deposits with every moment of confident, competent performance, and you make withdrawals with every moment of visible confusion. The balance must stay positive.
Leg Five: Affinity
Affinity means common ground. The audience feels that you are one of them, that you understand their world, that you share their values or experiences or perspective.
This is the leg that many magicians neglect, because magicians tend to present themselves as different from the audience — special, skilled, possessing abilities the audience lacks. This specialness can create interest, but it works against affinity. The more different you appear, the less the audience identifies with you.
My background as a non-magician actually served me well here. I am not a lifelong performer. I am a professional who discovered magic as an adult, which is a journey many audience members can relate to. When I frame my experience as “I came to this as an outsider, just like you might,” I create affinity. The audience sees someone who started where they are — a normal person fascinated by something extraordinary — rather than someone born into a world they can never enter.
Affinity is also created through shared cultural references, shared humor, and shared values. In the Austrian corporate context where I usually perform, this means understanding the specific culture of the room. A technology conference in Vienna has a different cultural vocabulary than a leadership retreat in the Tyrolean Alps. Adjusting my references — not my material, but my conversational touchpoints — to match the room creates affinity that a one-size-fits-all approach cannot.
Leg Six: Exclusivity
Exclusivity means the audience feels they are seeing something rare. This is not just about the tricks themselves — many audiences know that magicians perform the same material for different groups. Exclusivity is about the experience. This particular performance, with this particular audience, in this particular room, is unique. It will never happen exactly this way again.
Exclusivity is why audience participation matters so much. When a spectator makes a genuine choice — a real decision, not a forced selection — that choice makes the performance unique to this audience. The spectator’s name, their thought, their decision becomes part of the fabric of the performance, and that fabric cannot be replicated.
I was weak on exclusivity in my early shows. My performances were polished but generic. The scripts did not reference the specific event, the specific audience, or the specific context. A corporate dinner in Vienna received essentially the same show as a product launch in Graz. The material worked in both contexts, but neither audience felt that the show was theirs.
The fix was customization. Not wholesale rewriting for every event — that is impractical — but strategic personalization. Mentioning the company’s name or industry early in the show. Referencing something from the dinner conversation during the performance. Acknowledging the specific context: “You have all just survived three days of budget presentations, which means your minds are exhausted in a very specific way — which actually makes tonight’s experiment more interesting.” These small touches created the feeling that this show was designed for this room, and that feeling activated exclusivity.
Diagnosing the Weak Routines
With Padilla’s framework in hand, I returned to my two weak routines and checked each one against the six legs.
The first routine — the demonstration of a psychological principle — was missing three legs: Jeopardy (nothing at stake), Empathy (no emotional content to empathize with), and Exclusivity (the demonstration was identical every time regardless of audience). It had Authority (I presented the principle with confidence), Affinity (the principle was relatable), and Likability (my natural communication style carried it). Three out of six. No wonder it underperformed.
The second routine was missing two legs: Jeopardy (same problem — no real stakes) and Affinity (the effect used a framing that was about magic history, which the corporate audience did not connect with). It had the other four. Two missing legs. Still enough to undermine the routine.
The fixes were targeted. For the first routine, I restructured it to include a personal stake — I told the audience honestly that this particular experiment did not always work, and that the outcome depended on a genuine interaction between me and the volunteer. True or not in the strictest sense, this framing created Jeopardy. I added a brief personal story about why this principle fascinated me, which created Empathy. And I incorporated the specific volunteer’s choices into the narrative, which created Exclusivity. Three legs added. The routine went from polite interest to genuine engagement.
For the second routine, I replaced the magic-history framing with a business framing that the corporate audience could connect with — the same effect, recontextualized around how decisions are made under pressure in professional environments. This created Affinity. And I added consequences to the outcome — what the result might reveal about the volunteer’s decision-making style — which created Jeopardy. Two legs added. The routine improved significantly.
The Six Legs as Permanent Practice
Padilla’s framework is now a permanent part of my script development process. Every new routine gets checked against the six legs before it enters the show. Every existing routine gets rechecked periodically, because the balance of legs can shift as my performance evolves.
The framework is not about perfection — not every routine needs to be equally strong on all six legs. Some routines will lean heavily on Authority and Jeopardy. Others will lean on Empathy and Affinity. The mix can vary. But no routine should be missing more than one leg, and ideally, all six should be present to some degree.
It is a diagnostic tool, not a creative tool. It does not tell you what to write. It tells you what is missing from what you have already written. And that distinction makes it invaluable, because the hardest creative problem is not generating ideas — it is identifying the specific weakness in an idea that is almost working but not quite.
Six legs. Check each one. Strengthen what is weak. Cut what cannot be fixed. This is the discipline that separates routines that work from routines that merely exist.