For some reason, your players decide they want to join the BBEG

>For some reason, your players decide they want to join the BBEG
How would you deal with this? Would you let them? Would you create some obstacle so they can't join the BBEG or would you railroad them into fighting him? If they do join forces with the BBEG, what becomes their new 'objective'?

HARD MODE: Your players are in agreement that, given the nature of the greater conflict in the setting, the BBEG is actually the guy who has the best and most moral solution to the problem. The argument your players give you is rock solid, as a result of a mistake you made while trying to improvise earlier in the campaign actually making the "good guys" kind of evil.

If that's what they wanna do and they can convince him/her/it that they want to join then fuck it, that's how the story plays out. It's collaborative fiction, not my pet movie script.

You let them, dipshit. You let them (or at least let them try, depending on how many of the BBEGs people they've killed), then give the decision consequences without going full John Goodman Greentext and punishing them for disagreeing with you.

You mean for once in their lives, my players actually make a decision and WANT to do something besides willfully going down the railroad that I'm forced to create for them because, if left to their own devices, they all stand around like turkeys? Fuck, I'll throw my notes out the window and run with whatever they want. At least they made a choice.

You actually wrote a villain worth a damn of course you roll with it.

>BBEG

*cringe*

>*cringe*
Ugh!

>Ugh!
Blegh.

Calling things "cringe" is about as cringey as it gets. It shows you're a loser who makes fun of people you see as bigger losers than you, which actually makes you the biggest loser of all. There is nothing more pathetic, not even bronies

>bbeg

Ugh.

cring

>without going full john goodman
but pulling a glock out is the highlight of my night though

DO IT

That shit can be the funnest fucking thing ever!!!

Work with them to find a proper objective like, military victory, personal revenge or immortality, worked with our campaign

Do them a favor though and DON"T scale down what enemies the evil player fights alongside, human players are a lot ore resilient and deadly than most DM's give them credit for, keep it fair and interesting to both sides (asthmatic dragons and 2hp undead DO NOT make for good allies)

>(asthmatic dragons and 2hp undead DO NOT make for good allies)
Please tell me there's a story here.

As long as it fits their alignment

>Blegh.
Toink!

Couldn’t have said it better myself!

It’s a good chance to try something new. You could even argue that having the party act as antagonists in the setting gives them an opportunity to come up with their own goals, reducing your workload.

Then let them. After the session start thinking about how things will go down in the future. Does the person they wish to join have a reason to distrust them and have massive tensions despite their common goals? Do the former "Good Guys" have anything up their sleeve that hasn't been revealed yet and/or could be modified to actually give the players a run for their money?

There is absolutely nothing wrong when the party unanimously changes their entire objective, the issue is how to make that new objective fun.

I wouldn't allow this simply because I make my BBEG pretty BBEG and I don't want to run an evil campaign.

They join. They get promised power. They are given power. The power ensnares them. They are either completely dominated and lose their characters, or they die.

This is all in an epilogue, so fuck you. No saves straight up TPK.

I've never run a game with ancient evils, or where the fate of the world hangs in the balance. In fact all of my bbegs have been people the pcs have interacted with and through their own volition chanted "Fuck that guy" enough times to rank him up.

So I don't see that happening, but if it did, because my plots are much more grounded all it would mean is the nature of the next objective has shifted.

>Would you let them?
Why wouldn't you let them do it unless you are an unimaginative railroading autist?
The only reason you shouldn't allow it is if joining the BBEG goes completely against the personality of the character and is clearly a dumb decision made without any care for how much sense it makes in-universe.
>Would you create some obstacle so they can't join the BBEG or would you railroad them into fighting him?
If the BBEG already considers them worthy of joining him, then no obstacles, otherwise have them prove their worth to him before they get to join their armies, with the obstacle being that the BBEG will probably be suspicious that the same people who opposed him previously now want to join him.
>If they do join forces with the BBEG, what becomes their new 'objective'?
Helping the BBEG achieve whatever goal he has.
The players switching sides can be pretty interesting, specially if they have been in that campaign for quite a while.
Having them fight the people they considered friends and allies and face the entire world's scorn for the sake of what they believe is the greater good can make a great story.

That basically happened in my last Dungeon World campaign.

Basically, a bunch of undead had infiltrated the various non-zealot city-states, and were preparing to bury all the world in eternal night/death/doom/etc.

When the players found out that the cool wizard bro who'd been handing them their quests and info and rewards was in on it, the original 'plan' was that they'd kill the fucker.

Instead, they confronted him, and said, "We wanna join up."

He promptly liched the fighter, vamped the thief, and the bard (who'd become a werewolf due to other shenanigans) talked the priest round. Turns out the God of the Sky and Knowledge doesn't actually give a shit about things like 'sunlight' and 'life', and so his god was fine with this.

They still managed to lose.

My players did this by accident once - one of the characters was hard of hearing and we had a table rule that we wouldn't ever repeat things to the player if he misheard. Things got REALLY out of hand.

They are in for a wild ride.

ITS THE OTHER WAY AROUND YOU BAKA ASS MOTHERFUCKER

story.

Please don't. Not every shitty premise needs expounded upon.

My players did this the BBEG just waved some shiny goodies in front of them and all they had to do was crucify the party mage. They jumped at the opportunity, that is not to say the other side was much better but they didn't even bother doing a cursory background check on this mysterious individual who could make his servants appear from the shadows at will. I look forward to them realising that they will be opposed to their future actions but until then they can go a mage murdering rampage.

As long as everyone is still in character I'm down with it.

The BBEG would certainly find something for them to do.

I've had a couple tables that worked like this. It's fine for silly fun, but if you're trying to run a serious game you will be miserable. Multiversal annihilation and the condemnation of every innocent soul to the worst possible hell has arisen out of OOC misunderstandings.

>join BBEG
>he makes you a janitor

>not doing a slow burn of reluctant heroes turned demons and monsters slowly getting addicted and learning the joys of doing evil

We played a game where a player basically became Genghis Khan to the setting, easily the greatest candidate for BBEG, but the slight player majority wanted to follow her so that became the game.

The DM was fine with that and just had to retool the game, like the plot and opponents/obstacles in the way of the player's force in the world.

Let them but swap around what they fight.
Now the huge mass of easily dispatched undead and kobolds are replaced by elite, highly intelligent agents armed to the teeth in magical weaponry with preternaturally seamless teamwork and a vindictive streak a mile wide.

>"I joined the BBEG's evil empire but ended up becoming his janitor???!!!"
>The new best seller Light Novel from Japan

>"I joined the BBEG's evil empire but ended up becoming her janitor???!!!"

You have no pandering skill user.

>her

have them play out convincing and joining the villain to let them join. then when they succeed, ask them to hand me their characters, make a note on each of their sheets and put them in the campaign folder under "lieutenants" asking them to roll new characters.
i generally don't run games for players who want to side with the bad guys or villains. agree or not, the villain is the villain and the plot is about overcoming him and his philosophy. if you wanna play a different game you're welcome to run it, i'll gladly play in any game any of my players want to run.

>PCs
>planning to serve someone faithfully and not betray them to steal their power

Of course you let them. Plot twists like that are the best stories in roleplaying.

>Toink
Blort!

>back in the days of yore, high school D&D
>halfway through campaign BBEG approaches players
>gives them one chance to join him
>"Okay"
>"Yeah, sounds cool"
>they all agree
>too dumb at the time to figure out how any of the logistics for being the BBEG's lieutenants would work
>instead BBEG is disappointed in them that his nemeses are so easily swayed
>leaves and says they aren't worthy of serving him
Haunts me to this day.

It’s about the players choice, quit being a dickweed. It’s your job to craft their story not railroad them into a certain theme or idea.

You sound like a shit GM.

if the players choose to play a game like that, they are more than welcome to run it. the game is not JUST about the players. see unlike a lot of GMs i discuss with my players before hand the type of game i'm going to run, if they dont want to play that then they dont have to. i'm not holding them at gunpoint telling them they have to come. i dont go to their houses every week and drag them from their homes so i can make dinner for them and run a game in my mom's basement. the type of game is agreed upon beforehand. i want to have fun too, and i explicitly state before every new story that i do not run evil games or games on the side of a villain.
the game is an agreement between people and not all about one side's choice. if one of them wants to play something i dont run there is NOTHING stopping them from running it. but in more than 12 years of running games not once has one of my players said they want to run a game when they want something i dont want to run. fuck i even offer them all of the campaign notes and setting information so they could run exactly my game the way they want. on 12 years i've never had a player take me up on that offer.

its ok user. i think a few of us have things that haunt us from highschool D&D days.

>BBEG

Ugh.

Worked for the bad guy team the "Black Legion" or "Legion of Vaas"

they worshiped a death god that was also a dragon god,

through some schenanigans involving the use of 2 death clerics and their divine interventions, I rose up 20 death mounds from a battlefield,

so I was working with dragons, knights, and a slowly growing army of undead

For SOME REASON every time I ran into the heroes with these forces, the dragons rarely used their breath attacks if at all, and all the corpse mounds, zombies, and skeletons seemed to go down with one hit from everything and anything

everything seemed stacked way in the heroes favor and the fights lost their edge, if you take the venom from a cobra all you left is a belt

and letting others indulge in their own sadism can ramp the stakes from the norm!

"If you join the BBEG, you will be his henchmen. Remind me, what happens to henchmen who fuck up under the employ of a BBEG?"

death and punishment

how to avoid these?

answer: do not fail, fear dem consquences

oh god, this. A thousand times this!

I'd welcome the fact that they are doing anything and actually getting invested instead of refusing to party up with the others because "lol I have no reason to trust these guys"

>I was searching for a job to cure me of my hikkimori NEET ways and when I was pulled into another world I gained the Janitor class so I joined the BBEG for power but he appointed me as head janitor?!

Fuck your novel

ur a grot

Lmao, bet she even bought a commission

Let them. and then build a group of heroes as the final endgame battle. The PC's are the second to last battle the good guys have to defeat.