Your PCs may be great at coming up with incendiary devices that'll wreak havoc on their enemies, but once those enemies foolish enough to fall into the trap are dealt with, it stands to reason that the next foe will come prepared. Indeed, thethey might even pick up on the idea of using Molotovs themselves, which will create interesting challenges for the PCs.
Furthermore, carrying a buckbucket load of molotovMolotov cocktails is not only uncomfortable and cumbersome, it's also highly dangerous. Imagine yourself walking around with a backpack full of gasonlinegasoline-filled coke-bottles with little or less in ways of stoppers or the bottles breaking.
If your players doesdo not carry a lot of Molotovs at once, I think that the problem will solve itself once they're in battle. Molotovs are, after all, one-shot-devices devices.
Much of what I said above applies here as well (Don'tdon't limit, challenge), but I'll spend a few lines expanding on this.
Having PCs that are creative and inventive with their playing is usually a very fun group to be DM for. Even more, even more when compared to the opposite. Allow their creativity and ingenuity to thrive: encourage them to seek new solutions and fun ways of doing things. You come off, to me at least, as a good enough DM to handle it.
It can, admittedly, at some point get out of hand (when the Dwarven Engineer in your low-fantasy setting starts talking about propelling slugs through a small, handheld pipe via controlled explosions, for instance), you might wanna step in. There are many ways for a DM to limit the PCSPCs, both inside and outside the game. A few of them follows:
- Talk to your players. If they are veterans, they should be aware of the concept of Meta-gamingmetagaming, and how and why to avoid it.
- Carefully limit them, in-game. The things they want to buy is out-of-stock, thethey can't find the right merchant or similar. Your PCs may not be thrilled about tihsthis limitation, but if the level of limitation matches the level of outrageousness in their idea, they can't really complain.
- Simply tell them: this can't be done. A DM is within his or her rights to make such calls. It's not fun having to do it, but sometimes it's necessary. A brilliant example, in my opinion, of when a DM should have stepped in like this can be found in the Movie The Gamers: a thief uses pickpocket to steal a man's pants. While he is wearing them. While sitting down. A moment later, the thief constructs a ballista inside a tavern and backstabs an enemy with it. The scene can be found here.
##Notes
The views I have expressed here are based upon twelve years of on-and-off tabletop roleplaying as well as being the DM for a handful of campaigns of varying game systems, length and, for lack of a better word, seriousness. I do not, by any means, claim that these are the only solutions, nor necessarily the best ones, but merely the ones I have tried and found to work well.
- The views I have expressed here are based upon twelve years of on-and-off tabletop roleplaying as well as being the DM for a handful of camapigns of varying game system, length and, for lack of a better word, seriousness. I do not, by any means, claim that these are the only solutions, nor necessarily the best ones, but merely the ones I have tried and found to work well.
