Decision literacy under constraint
Practice the tradeoff you will actually face.
Updated August 2026
Budget, personnel, trust, political capital. Cascades across power, water, health, and logistics. Use it for staff literacy and seminar practice — not as a live incident system.
What you are practicing
ResponseWindow is a browser emergency-management simulation. Each turn has three phases — briefing, decision, after-action — and exactly five decision slots. You do not get to do everything. You sequence.
This is not a certification and not a live incident-command system. It does not replace required professional training, and it is not a tool for managing a live incident.
How the engine stays honest
The simulation is deterministic. The same state, the same decisions, and the same seed always produce the same casualties, the same cascades, and the same win or loss.
Optional AI writes briefings, headlines, and replay prose after those facts exist. It cannot change the engine.
The briefing may be written by a model. The casualties are not.
Tabletop exercise versus this
A tabletop exercise is a facilitated discussion of a scenario. Players talk through what they would do. This simulation forces the same kind of tradeoff, then resolves it: casualties, cascades, and trust move according to a documented engine, not a facilitator’s adjudication.
Use a tabletop when the goal is coordination practice and conversation. Use ResponseWindow when the goal is comparing decisions on a fixed seed, or letting someone feel a cascade they caused.
| Compare | Paper / VTTX tabletop | ResponseWindow |
|---|---|---|
| Install | Slides, rooms, facilitators | Browser, no install |
| Resolution | Facilitator | Seed-locked engine |
| Action limit | Soft | Hard: five slots per turn |
| Repeatability | Low unless scripted tightly | Exact replay from seed and decisions |
| Best for | Staff coordination | Decision quality and consequence literacy |
Running it with a group
A seed-locked exercise gives every participant the same scenario, difficulty, and event sequence, so a group debrief compares like with like. Codes are minted from Share exercise inside a running game and redeemed at /join .
There is no seminar console yet. The classroom pack on For instructors is the current one-week plan: objectives, recommended scenarios, and optional grading.