Situation: you want to empty a building.
Traditional: walk in and pull the fire alarm.
Subtle: hack into the building’s computers to set off the fire alarm.
Subtlety Nouveau: start a fire.
Situation: your route is blocked by snow.
Traditional: snowplough.
Subtle: snowshoes.
Subtlety Nouveau: tornado.
Situation: you are fighting a foe who relies very heavily on radio communication.
Traditional: jammers.
Subtle: decrypt and subvert.
Subtlety Nouveau: high-altitude nuclear burst.
Situation: you need information from the captain’s safe of an enemy warship in harbour. The fact that you have this information must be kept secret.
Traditional: sneak on board, open the safe, photograph or hand copy the information, put it back, leave undetected.
Subtle: Find a way to read the information without ever boarding the ship.
Subtlety Nouveau: Sneak on board, open the safe, take the contents, leave undetected, then blow up the ship.
You blow up the ship in punishment for them having such lousy security, naturally.
Just to disguise the loss of the safe contents.
You need a distraction on the docks in a shadowrun game:
Traditional: bar fight
Subtle: have the decker convince everyone they are at the dock you want to be at when they are at a different dock.
Subtlety Nouveau: orc/human race riot
…that covers a significant part of the city, which just happens to include the docks.
Situation: A biker gang are probably using a fur farm as cover for human trafficking and other illegal stuff.
Traditional: Grab a goon and beat or bribe the info out of him.
Subtle: Sneak into the fur farm under cover of darkness and get photographic evidence.
Subtlety Nouveau: Set a mob of Animal Liberation Front people and a rival biker gang loose on the fur farm simultaneously, then do your sneaking under cover of the huge bloodbath which results…