Player creativity

[Anastasia]

How do you deal with player creativity as a DM? I'm going to start this with an anecdote, so bear with me.

A couple of adventures back, a group of PCs were on the Elemental Plane of Fire. They were undergoing some trials in the realm of Kossuth and that naturally entailed fighting a bunch of fiery creatures. One of the battles sorely pressed the PCs with grappling and bad odds. It was looking bad for the PCs until the party gish had an idea. She'd come into possession of a decanter of endless water* not too long ago. She had the idea of flying up and blasting the flaming baddies with the decanter's water. Sounds like a decent idea and thinking a bit outside of the box, right? I hadn't thought of it at all and the PC asked me how effective this would be. I had her roll a knowledge check on it and only half sold it, saying that she wasn't sure and blah blah blah blah. This killed the idea and she ended up doing something else with her turn.

I feel like I didn't run with the idea. I'd prepped this up as a difficult fight; this was 5:3 odds and the tactical advantage lied with the bad guys. I wanted this to be a hard earned victory for the players...but isn't a big part of DMing rewarding player creativity and working with them to make the game fun? What do you guys think?

*I'd missed it in my prepwork  but creation/summoning of water is impeded on the Elemental Plane of Fire. It's also not really relevant to the thrust of the point. So shush.

[Dracos]

I've seen games where almost everything the players do the GM goes "Yes, and it works and you win.  Session over."  (exaggerated (slightly)) but the 'play along' mechanic can actually sour a game very easily taken to an extreme.  A little frustration is actually healthy for a game flow.  It makes the creative moments more special and keeps the notion that not everything works in the world.

At the same time, the reverse can knock someone right out of the game.  Players RP for many reasons, but a sense of creative involvement is certainly a pretty common one.  If the players do not feel empowered to express themselves, then it can easily be disatisifying.  Note: And this is something I get wrong often...expressing themselves does not truly have much to do with freedom in the world and the ability to affect it.  Over the years, I've seen an amazing number of players have almost no interest in affecting a world.

To me, the best metrics seem to be (Pretty much evenly weighted):

A)Does the cool idea make the story more fun?
B)Have I said yes to cool ideas often recently from this player?
C)Does it seem like the other players would enjoy it too!
D)Is it within the game reality boundaries?

A is pretty obvious why.  A cool idea that makes the story less fun might not be a bad idea (A skillful trick to avoid the Big Bad coming to power, for instance) but if it means that the players and GM are floundering for some time after, that'll definitely run a good game flow.  Meanwhile, if it starts an exciting narrative of its own, then it is providing entertainment for everyone.  It's definitely part of what Cool Moments you can tell.

B is less obvious and easily overlooked.  Players that come up with ideas They think are cool and always have it no'ed are not going to do it often.  Indeed, you could almost say 'you should almost always Yes the first idea from a player'.  Even with experienced old hats, just to get the flow going of adding in.  When players find they can't express the cool ideas within the game, they become less involved so it's definitely important to keep track of at least "Did I say no last time this player had an idea?"

C is almost without saying.  It's actually the best reason to say No on that line, had such an idea as posited come out early.  If a battle is ended right off by a good idea, One player feels awesome.  The other players feel uninvolved.  The more players involved in a neat idea the better, but more importantly, creative impulses shouldn't leave the others with nothing to do (either before or after them.  Moments of Single Glory have their place)

And D is the easy one.  Can people see the cool idea working?  It doesn't even matter whether it really works (see the rulebook answer there :P) but does it fit within the shared belief of how the world works.

[Carthrat]

Sometimes though it can lead to impacting things you didn't foresee. I mean, to take the example presented there, if fire elementals (or whatever) were getting set up to be a common foe, and one learned that splashing them with a fairly cheap item was more effective than breaking out the usual powerful attacks.. which are they gonna pick? You can mass-market the things and have an invincible army of nobodies laying waste to salamanders and efreeti left and right.

Obviously this is a bit extreme, but if something works once, it can often be *repeated*. In some games, that's gonna be a problem.

In particular, I know this is a high-level epicish D&D game. Do cute tricks like that really stack up to the stuff the players are already toting? I'd probably lean on no.

BTW, I think Drac outlined the issue really well- it's a real problem when a GM doesn't set any boundaries and lets anything fly, but if you're going to not let something through, you should definately be able to identify *why* the creative idea doesn't work- and if everyone is going to like it, it's hard to see why it shouldn't happen.

I'd think his option D applies to this scenario; even if the water damaged the fire creatures, that doesn't make it an efficient option for people with such raw power at their disposal.