Plot armor
Plot armor is writer and gamer short-hand for a character that has a role to play in the story, and can’t be killed until they do. Say the prologue of a book is about the main character walking up to some villain all in black and saying, “Finally. Let’s do this.” Then chapter one starts 72 hours earlier.
Television shows do that kind of thing all the time. When you first see the villain menacing the show’s hero, you know neither of them will die yet. 72 hours later, they are going to be trading cool one-liners, after all — not that my hypothetical line was cool, but you get the point. When the villain runs the hero’s car off a cliff, you know that the main character survives the fall, otherwise how could they show up at the end?
That’s plot armor.
In role-playing games, plot armor can be dangerous. If the PCs really want to kill the villain you’re making them fight, but you never let them lay a finger on them, or the villain survives no matter what, then you probably have some frustrated players. But sometimes that villain plays a super important role later in the story — they are the Big Bad, after all — and you have to protect them so they can survive to carry it out. So they always vanish, beat the PC party, or otherwise escape scenes where the main characters are trying to nail them.
So what’s the best way to use plot armor?
Well, the easiest answer is don’t. Not if you can at all get around it. For the most part, avoid repeat battles between your Big Bad and player characters if that villain needs to survive them all. For other enemy NPCs, maybe make sure that there aren’t any plot points in your campaign that absolutely require one character, no substitutions or refunds. Give the character in question a twin sibling, a clone, or an heir. If they survive their meetings with the PCs, then great, they can do their thing.
But if the PCs are just relentless — and I’ve never met one that wasn’t — or get lucky enough to take out the key NPC, well, you get the spare key NPC from under the doormat and you still have your plot point to deploy when the time is right.
But what if you really have to use plot armor? Maybe your plot point just doesn’t work with a twin, clone or heir. That’s okay. But if you only have one NPC who can do an evil thing that needs to happen, then don’t put them where the PCs might kill them.
If you put a villain in front of the PCs, they’re going to fight. That’s what players do. It’s their job to fight the villain. If you don’t want them to fight the villain, then don’t put them within weapons’ reach.
We’ve talked about this in My Guide to RPG Storytelling because this happens all the time, and we’ve had to get creative to keep players from just dog-piling the antagonist the first chance they get. Your villain can communicate with the PCs in dreams, by magic, through lieutenants or messengers, or by their actions off-screen.
It’s much like we say about rolling dice — don’t let the dice decide anything that you can’t afford for PCs to fail. If your players don’t roll well enough, give them the result or information that they need, but at a cost — a character’s hand gets injured reaching into a dark space, or they lose energy or willpower learning about the terrible cosmic horror that they ventured into the forbidden library to study.
But in the case of actual villains that you need to keep physically intact until the final confrontation, do what you need to in order to keep distance between the PCs and that mission-critical NPC.
Say that’s just not possible, though. Your campaign story absolutely requires that you put the PCs and their enemy in a room together, but the Big Bad must get away intact? Maybe the villain can talk their way out of the situation without weapons being drawn — which would just be awesome. But if the PCs are set on fighting, plot armor means that they absolutely cannot win.
Any time you just force the PC party to fail, no matter what they do, you run a risk. That’s a really frustrating situation for your players, and gaming is supposed to be fun. The whole point of RPGs is that they allow your audience (the players) more agency and power than they have just watching a movie. If you take that away from them, what’s the point?
If you get creative, though, you can use carrots to incentivize the PC party not to murder your walking plot point, rather than just making them invulnerable. But how?
The Big Bad can give the PCs something else to do besides kill them — like rescuing a bunch of puppies, for example. “So, heroes, what’s it to be? Vengeance or… saving the puppy-orphanage?”
It’s a classic villain move for a good reason. Twists on that — like blowing something up so that the player characters have to save themselves from a decompressing spaceship, collapsing the building they’re fighting in, retracting the bridge between the PCs and the villain, or leaving an NPC dangling by a burning rope — can convince the PCs that there’s something more important than just killing this villain. And now the Big Bad gets to escape to carry out their plot point, and the PCs get to do something badass and/or heroic.
But you can’t use this same trick too many times. The PCs will almost certainly rescue puppies from the burning orphanage the first time. Maybe even the second time. But honestly, I doubt it will even take a third time before the players come to hate puppies and start to plan on blowing up every orphanage in the area themselves, just so the villain can’t use it to escape again.
Just one more thing to think about: events often have plot armor, too. Most of the time, players don’t even notice all of the things going on that they have no power over, but as a Storyteller, it’s something worth thinking about.
If a PC gets stabbed in the back by an enemy and the player never got to make a Mind + Perception roll to hear them sneaking up, you’ll probably have a pissed-off player because you’ve denied them agency in their own narrative.
Let’s say the ship that the characters are on hits a reef and breaches the hull, though. The ship is taking on water and the PCs have to leap into action in a crisis to safely beach the ship before they all go down. Did the PCs have any control over whether the ship hit the reef or not? Nope. Even if I gave them a roll to spot the reef, chances are that success will just give them a bonus in the crisis, not let them avoid the reef entirely. After all, I need the ship to crash on this island for the story.
But the players retain their agency in the crisis, saving crew that fall overboard, bailing water, and steering the ship to a safe crash landing. It gives them enough power to affect the outcome that they probably won’t notice that they didn’t get to change the setup. Having a measure of agency helps obscure the fact that a plot event cannot be avoided and can make all the world of difference for the players caught up in them.
