Strategic vs Tactical Play

[Firechanter]

My DM brought this up when we discussed the upcoming campaign, desired OP level and those things. He didn't talk about "low" or "high" op but brought in a different dimension: strategic vs tactical play, but he didn't mean it in the traditional(?) sense of strategic as character planning between sessions, but as the result of different op levels in actual encounters.

Tactical: what you get out of rather low-op characters. You make your moves, roll your dice, maybe activate some abilities here and there, and see what happens. You do your turns, enemy does theirs and you react to their moves. Damage is rolled, hit points are deducted, rinse and repeat.

Strategic: a result of optimized play. It's basically the same as above, except for the "see what happens" bit, because you already know. The question is not how many attacks the Boss survives -- you already know the answer is "none". The question is just what you have to do to get off your encounter-ending attack (which may be the +400HP damage of a Charger, or a Save-or-Suck with impossibly high DC of a Caster, whatever gets the job done).

Now the way I see it, both approaches have their benefits and drawbacks. The main drawback of pure "tactical" play is that encounters may devolve into just rolling down each other's HP until one side keels over. Personally I find this terribly boring in the long run.
The drawback of "strategic" play, on the other hand, is that a well thought-out strategy will trivialize most encounters, because the DM can't threaten the PCs anymore with regular opponents. And if the DM starts optimizing the opponents to stand a chance against player strategy and be a threat again, the game quickly devolves into Rocket Tag -- which may be exciting at first but will soon become frustrating, because extreme results _always_ stack up against the players in the long run.

Personally, while I see the point he's making, I'm not entirely happy with his nomenclature -- for me, strategic and tactical mean different things. Maybe someone here has a better suggestion.

Any other thoughts on the matter? Discuss!

[BowStreetRunner]

The way I normally delineate between strategic and tactical in an RPG is a bit different. A 20-level build plan is strategic. Questing for the materials needed to craft that magic item you plan to use starting at 15th level is strategic. How you fight a particular battle is tactical. Sure, for some players their tactics only go so far as targeting priorities (casters first), while others might spend time maneuvering to allow them to get off the optimal use of whirling blade, but it's still all tactics.

[nedz]

There is a difference between building a character and playing one — but both can have tactical and strategic aspects.

A tactical move in a build would be some trick which governs your options you for a level or two, like choosing your spells known for a Sorcerer, whilst the strategic aspect would be your 20 level build plan.

I hope we all know the difference between tactical and strategic actions during play.

In short your DM in conflating two different aspects of different processes.

[Darth Ultron]

Well, you could go with normal game play and non-normal non-game play. That kinda gets to the core of optimization: skipping game play.

Just think of any encounter. In a normal game it's a lot of give and take and dice rolling and waiting to see what happens. And just about anything can happen, it's exciting and dynamic and random. And it can take several minutes or even a great many minutes to resolve the encounter.

Now take optimized. It's simply a toss up to who goes first and ends the encounter as quickly as possible. It's very straightforward. And it only takes a minute or two at the most(if it takes longer, your not optimized).

So group one is fighting the trolls for a full 30 minutes of real time. And group two finishes the troll encounter after just three minutes and is ready to move on to the next encounter.

[NichG]

The problem is that your first example isn't an example of tactical play, or at least its an example of tactical play unsupported by the DM or system.

The difference between strategy and tactics has to do with the time horizon of the decision-making. Tactics is more about exploiting the local context and the local situation to win, whereas strategy is more about long-term planning and setting up the structures that allow you to win in the future. Strategy creates the context that tactics plays out.

A game that is strategy-dominated is one in which the decisions made before the battle have far more influence over the outcome than the decisions made during the battle are able to have. A game that is tactics-dominated is the reverse, where there is very little advantage you can develop in preparation and its almost all in the details of play. In general, it's good to balance the two factors, otherwise there's a part of the game that is basically pointless. E.g. if build is all that matters, then what you do in a fight doesn't change the outcome. But if skill in a fight is all that matters, then the character builds are irrelevant or 'samey'. So the balanced state is the thing that preserves the maximum importance of decisions made at each stage during the gameplay.

So for example, you can ask 'Lets say I give someone an un-optimized character in D&D, and put them up against an overpowering challenge. Would a sufficiently skillful player be able to still win despite having a bad starting position?'. If it doesn't matter how skillful your choices are during the fight, just what build you came in with, then it's a strategy-dominated situation. If a skilled player can pull out a win where others could not, despite having a bad build to work with, then it might be a balanced or tactics-dominated game.

[Amphetryon]

Well, you could go with normal game play and non-normal non-game play. That kinda gets to the core of optimization: skipping game play.

Just think of any encounter. In a normal game it's a lot of give and take and dice rolling and waiting to see what happens. And just about anything can happen, it's exciting and dynamic and random. And it can take several minutes or even a great many minutes to resolve the encounter.

Now take optimized. It's simply a toss up to who goes first and ends the encounter as quickly as possible. It's very straightforward. And it only takes a minute or two at the most(if it takes longer, your not optimized).

So group one is fighting the trolls for a full 30 minutes of real time. And group two finishes the troll encounter after just three minutes and is ready to move on to the next encounter.

Please note that this particular definition of 'optimized' is not the only definition used to discuss the concept as it pertains to D&D, or RPGs in general.