Plot Armor in Homebrew D&D and How to Overcome It

I'm a big fan of my players' characters, who've been part of our now nearly three-year-long homebrew campaign. That's exactly why it hurts all the more whenever one of these characters meets their end. But a few days ago, something occurred to me. Even though we started with the published adventure Lost Mine of Phandelver, the campaign quickly navigated into the uncertain waters of homebrew. You'd think "uncertain" is the right word, yet as it turns out, the characters' life expectancy has risen enormously ever since.

In the first 9 episodes of our campaign, two characters fell. Those were the first and the last deaths - even after more than 50 further episodes since. That raises the question: Am I subconsciously giving my players plot armor?

Let me get the most important part out of the way first. No, I don't intend to now systematically put my players' characters into deadly situations. This article is about the why, and how a DM, if they find themselves in a similar situation, can overcome it.

Down from Safe Harbor

In published campaigns, the DM is handed a campaign setting complete with all its NPCs, monsters, quests, and secrets. Players are free to choose which quests to pursue. Running the game takes less effort, because everything is already laid out. If the party unknowingly picks a quest that's too tough, and the resulting fight leads to one or more characters dying, the DM can lean back and say, "I only did what's in the book." From the players' perspective, the difficulty of the enemy was pure chance, a whim of fate.

In homebrew campaigns, the DM doesn't flesh out the entire world down to the last detail before the first episode is played. As preached in the Dungeon Master's Guide and by most DMs, a city or a specific dungeon, for example, should only be fleshed out once it actually becomes relevant to the story.

As a result, there's no such thing as "going off the beaten path" in the classic sense - at least not the way you'd know it from published campaigns. Whichever path the players take is the right one, because none of the other paths were fleshed out at that point - they were still sitting in a thick fog of uncertainty. It's simply not true that final boss fights need to be tense and deadly.

What we're really talking about are the fights that happen on the way to the finale. Encounters while traveling through the wilderness or in the alleys of a city. The fights that result from taking on a job for some trustworthy figure that has nothing to do with the main plot.

With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility

Suppose the players in a homebrew campaign decide to take on a minor side quest, and it ends with them burying several characters after a bloody fight against an overwhelming enemy. A similar case to the one described earlier with a published campaign. But in this case, the eyes inevitably turn to the DM. The criticism might be that the fight was chosen far too difficult, since it was, after all, just an unimportant side quest. On top of that, there might be a lingering suspicion that the DM deliberately let the characters die - whether out of arbitrariness or a supposedly flawed narrative. These are conflicts nobody wants to expose themselves to voluntarily. But where a basic property of published campaigns nips such thoughts in the bud, with homebrew there's a grain of truth that can't simply be dismissed.

Because ultimately, in homebrew campaigns, it's the DM who decides how difficult a fight is. By choosing a lethal fight, they take on the risk that one or more players will lose their character. That such tragedies rarely occur is surely helped by the fact that very few DMs, while prepping, spontaneously decide to throw a deadly enemy at their players that threatens to wipe out the whole group. Where would the fun be in that?

Because the DM in homebrew takes on the responsibility for character deaths, it's only understandable that the reluctance to build in deadly fights runs deep. On top of that, the DM might not want to part with ideas they had in mind, long-term, for individual characters or the group. For the sake of group cohesion, fun, time pressure, and narrative, the players' characters get handled with kid gloves - plot armor - whether consciously or not.

Losing Control

To overcome plot armor, and to avoid it going forward, two points need to be addressed. First, you need to find a way to better cope, as a DM, with the situation when characters die because of your own decisions. Second, it's important not only to let the players know about upcoming changes and their consequences, but to actually get their buy-in.

The keyword for negating plot armor is coincidence. Fundamentally, it's about handing over a bit of control over what happens to the characters. Random tables for encounters are excellent for this. It also helps to roll for the difficulty of a fight itself. Coincidence is everywhere in real life. Sometimes you get lucky, sometimes unlucky. Sometimes you're facing an easy fight, sometimes a hard one. The most important thing here is simply that there's an understanding between DM and players that, going forward, the course of the story and the difficulty of fights will depend, to some extent, on chance - chance that the DM themselves can't influence either.

Everyone needs to understand that not every character death can be heroic and dramatically fitting if you're committed to avoiding plot armor. The certainty that chance once again has more influence over the campaign creates an opposite kind of uncertainty about who's really responsible for a tragic character death - the dice, bound to cold indifference, or the diabolical mind of the DM.

Afterword

These are, of course, once again thoughts from my own perspective. Still, I've tried to phrase them as generally as possible, even though they're probably only of interest to DMs who've been running homebrew campaigns for a while. I'm happy to be convinced otherwise. I hope I was able to offer a few good starting points to help you get more enjoyment out of your games.