The Dragon Slayers

So, story for you.

TL;DR: GM has to deal with two players who are hyper-prepared, take pages and pages of notes, and actively uses everything at their character's disposal to get their goals accomplished in a way that crushes any thought of opposition by the sheer force of temporal power they can bring to bear to satisfy their schemes.

I was at a table with a group of hard-core players, and a GM who didn't know what he was getting into. Two of the players kept extensive notes on everything that happened in the game: names of NPCs they met, deals and oaths made, people they saved, and damn near wrote a portfolio on these people.

If we wound up going to the same town / city, they'd touch base with these people, cement ties, do favours, etc, etc.

Me? I was like 14. I was not ready for this either. I was just along for the ride.

Well. One day, the players tell the GM 'we're going to stage a coup'. The region we were in had a tyrant ruling it, and the PCs decided they were going to take him down.

The GM was like 'what'? I'm pretty sure he was going for a long game here, where we'd build up a bunch of levels, storm the keep, fight the guy in single combat kind of stuff. You know, 80s AD&D.

They brought out the Book. Notes on everything they'd done. And then they step-by-step laid out what they were doing. Who they were calling favours from. The people who owed them. That kind of stuff.

In AD&D, there's ally morale and loyalty checks, and a lot of loyalty checks were made. And if the GM had a twist or something to try to put a wrench into the works, the two would just go to 'plan B' or 'plan C' or whatever, because of the sheer volume of contacts and allies they'd made.

And because they'd kept going back and doing favours, they got a bunch of perks on those loyalty checks, so having things go south was really, really unlikely, and they had contingencies for almost everything.

It was impressive to watch, but my head was spinning, and I think the GM's was as well. It took a few hours - with a lot of dice rolls, a spot of RP to cement stuff, a bunch more dice rolls, because the GM didn't want to run each and every social encounter ... that'd take scads of sessions, so most of it was quick rolls.

The end result, a coup. The PCs barely needed to lift a finger except to be the motivating force, and wound up in charge. And the direction of the campaign veered drastically 90 degrees.

Right. So. The dragon.

I hear a number of GMs who go 'well, the dragon should have been ready, because it's hyper intelligent and can do this and this and the GM was bad and should feel bad'.

Those GMs didn't see what happened.

So, the game master had a dragon in the area causing problems. The pair decided to deal with it. Your typical thing in AD&D was 'hire a bunch of NPCs to help you out, go into the cave, fight the dragon, and watch scads of those NPCs die helping you'.

Nah, they weren't up for that.

They scouted the dragon's domain, picked out patterns and such, picked the perfect people for the job, and began working on an ambush.

You close off the primary entrance to the lair, having set up a trap at the other route. Dragon comes out at the sign of danger, usually by flying out at full speed to get airborne ... and right into the net.

A bunch of web spells, wall spells, entangle, everything they could to pin the dragon down. Then it was a bunch of flanking, ranged attacks and magic, making sure not to be in LOS of the breath weapon, and beating the thing down hard and fast.

In AD&D, a dragon's breath weapon does damage equal to its current hit points. If it was airborn it could pop up to 16 attacks per round, and you just didn't want that. So, net, pin, entrap, kill.

It didn't get a single attack off, there were no casualties.

And yeah, I hear a lot of, "Well, the dragon should have..." to which, 'and they had a contingency'. Like I said, they took so many notes...

I mean, closest thing in RL I could say to an 18 Intelligence or something. I pride myself in being a tactician but they took the cake.

The GM just didn't know how to keep up with them. I mean, the RP was excellent, and they were deep into the RP, and that was fun as hell for everyone. But when they got a goal they pursued it with laser focus, and really, there wasn't anything anyone would be able to do to stop them.

"Well, that person died."

*flip, flip, flip* "Alright. Well, I contact this temple, reminding them when we did this thing for them and dropped off this other thing, and would they be so kind as to bring that person back? So, meanwhile, we contact this other person, and we do this, and..."

Or, "Alright, so this person goes to report you to the king for treason."

Them: *flip, flip, flip, flip* "So, we'd called in a favour to this guy about two months ago to keep an eye out for stuff like that. He'd very likely find out about this first, and let us know. Then there's these other two people in court who we told to keep an ear out and speak on our behalf, so it's his word against theirs. And didn't we have a geas with this guy to prevent this kind of thing? Oh, it was dispelled? Neat, we're going to find out who did it... this guy and this other guy have contacts in that kind of thing, we'll call in favours and have them find out who's responsible."

... it was madness.

I pride myself in my GM skills, but they'd stomp me flat. I don't think I've ever met a GM as crazy prepared as they were, and they forgot nothing. Their Book was just crammed with notes and I swear had a damned index.

They were fine with the GM flipping through it to - mostly to verify what they were doing. And once in awhile, "oh, yeah, that guy, I forgot about him. Oh crap."

Ever had a player like that?

Fortunately for me... no, no I haven't. I've got a player who is close to that, though. But rather than copious notes, he'll take time between sessions to discuss what his character can do, who his character knows, and experiment with what the character's capable of.

Which means when it's go-time, he's crazy prepared or has wheels within wheels running to aid the PCs. But ... yeah, nowhere near that level.

So, what would you do with players like that?