strategic, operational, tactical, and expressive decisions

[Oligopsony]

Mostly just trying to lay out some vocabulary to clarify my own thinking around this. Use it for your own purposes, repurpose it, ignore it, whatever.

Strategic decisions relate to deciding which goals characters will pursue, in a way that structures the rest of the campaign. For instance, “get rich raiding dungeons” vs “take over a city and try to reform its institutions.” Depending on which choice characters make, they’ll have to face different challenges.

Tactical choices concern ways to solve a problem that already presents itself and is known. A purely tactical decision rarely has consequences that last longer than the problem it solves, if it works, amd tactical decisions are the most likely to have technically correct answers. What attack action to use in your round, or how to describe disarming a trap, are tactical decisions.

Operational choices are a conceptually awkward but I think recognizable middle point between strategic and tactical, where you’re choosing which session-length problems to tackle. “Assassinate the duchess” vs “steal the Sword of Lamentations at the fireberry festival” (perhaps especially if these are most feasible during one specific time window) is an example. Choosing to follow which plot seeds is almost always an example. If PCs are Shadowrunners and they can choose from a job board that’s operational choice, if you’re playing Delta Green and everyone is summoned for a mission and briefed two hours in advance, that’s one where operational decisions aren’t as central.

Expressive decisions concern aesthetic and value concerns. These may be relatively “pure,” with few downstream effects, or they may be more mixed (for instance, with genuine tactical costs to doing the right thing, or strategic choices being expressive of broader values.)

Axis orthogonal to all of these: open vs closed: open decisions rely on players coming up with their own answers, closed choosing between options already given. Creative players with good GMs will often turn a closed decision into an open one.

Different cultures of play prioritize different kinds of decisions; for any one of these there are people who have a good time without them, or who find that most useful. Lacking any such decisions and I think you’ve removed the gamelike aspects, but I suspect this is vanishingly rare.

 

[pointofyou]

This seems like at least a plausible list. I suspect there'd be some arguing around the edges or over the number of axes or something. Probably because there are four things listed it reminds me of something an NPC said in a friend's campaign: "Anything that goes wrong in an operation will come to bad policy or bad strategy or bad tactics or bad luck."

 

[Deset Gled]

You're gonna give me Six Sigma flashbacks.

 

[Umbran]

Operational choices are a conceptually awkward but I think recognizable middle point between strategic and tactical, where you’re choosing which session-length problems to tackle. “Assassinate the duchess” vs “steal the Sword of Lamentations at the fireberry festival” (perhaps especially if these are most feasible during one specific time window) is an example. Choosing to follow which plot seeds is almost always an example. If PCs are Shadowrunners and they can choose from a job board that’s operational choice, if you’re playing Delta Green and everyone is summoned for a mission and briefed two hours in advance, that’s one where operational decisions aren’t as central.

I can more or less see where you are coming from on Strategic, tactical, and expressive choices. However, this is a view of "operational" that doesn't match how I usually see the word used.

In my experience, "Operational" choices are those made to support routine functions, to make sure the resources needed to take tactical actions that reach strategic goals are present. Operational decisions are frequently/largely concerned with logistics.

Like, in the software world, operational decisions are about how big servers need to carry loads put on them, and what kind of checks do we make to take a developer's code and put it into production.

In a fantasy world, the group may have made a strategic decision to take down the Dark Lord of Fallowby. They make tactical decisions during fights along the way. The paladin may make an expressive decision to face the DLoF himself, on the field of battle. The operational questions are like, "Were are we going to get all the horses we need for this army?"

That doesn't make your view of Operational wrong. But it seemed sensible to say this, to make folks aware of other uses of the term to help avoid confusion.