TTRPG Judge advice: The "Click" moment.

 Recently in one of my games a player had a small "click" moment. While fighting a group of wretched, rotten, rambling undead they stopped the tiring slog of back and forth hit point dumping and pulled out an oil flask. The other players nervously eyed each other and then the player. He poured the oil into a bottle then shoved wads of oil stained cloth in the neck. 

Cue the viking helmed dwarf watching a flaming bottle arc overhead and smash onto two zombies. Mouths open slack in silent screams as skin sizzled, eyes popped and flames flicked hungrily over the bodies. The undead abominations hit the ground burning merrily as the party looked stunned, as one turning at the beaming halfling.

Another older game was when our three adventurers came across a dungeon roomba (Gelatinous cube) and a pack of orcs interacting with it (trying to scoop out gold from within the cube). The dwarf engineer has a brilliant idea, he unstops the water cork on his alchemy jug and hucked it into the cube. The resulting flash boil not only dissolved a significant chunk of said roomba but also steamed the orcs nearby.

The "click" moment comes to players when they realise they can theoretically do anything within the game. This moment is really prevalent in combats when a player thinks outside the box, uses the items listen or tries anything that doesn't include wailing on an enemy with a pointy (or blunt) object until it stops moving.

These moments can't be artificially created, they must come naturally to players (you can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink). In saying this you can help the process along though. Some examples are having the NPC's around the players use different tactics and weapons, after a while the players will pick up on this and naturally try out the same strategies.

Give the PC's a wider list of non combat items to choose from, every player  loves tinkering and experimenting giving them a wider range of toys will naturally lead to this. 

Having your own "click" moments as a judge will naturally help your players as well, they will see you adapting to their strategies which will in turn start them on adapting to yours. Bouncing off each other in combat situations is a great way to have these natural "click" moments.

One last bit of advice is to not rush the process, it might sound annoying to wait for your players but if you're a caring, invested judge then it will be all the more worth it to watch them naturally "click"