Dead Cat Bounce

Plot armor is a writer's necessary approach when writing stories where the protagonist's life is regularly threatened.  Presumedly, the reader or viewer will like the character; and will not be happy if the character dies.  Bullets, therefore, can hit the character, but not kill the character.  The character can be poisoned, can fall prey to a brain tumor, can be kidnapped by aliens and be dropped down a well ... so long as things work out in the end.

There is a skill in making plot armor.  It has to be invisible.  Once the presence of plot armor becomes glaringly obvious, the tension in the story is gone.  Automatic survival, when it is understood to be certain by the audience, is boring.

D&D is not a writer's script or novel.  It is a game.  And by the rules of that game, stripped of all the rhetoric and self-aggrandizement, no one has plot armor.  Anyone can die.  In recent years, playing to a more sophisticated audience, writers have been moving towards an understanding that a universe with uncertainty is far more interesting and tension-building than one where most of the cast clanks about in their plot armor.

The risk, particularly in television, where an audience is cultivated for months or years before the death of a favored character, is that the viewer will deeply resent the writer killing their favorite character.  People get attached.

The question arises, is attachment a sufficient reason to circumvent the rules of the game and give player characters plot armor?  Clearly, many people think it is, because many games ~ and DMs ~ insist wholeheartedly that "a good game" demands less heartbreak and a corresponding amount of fudging on the DMs part to ensure no one dies, who should not die, unless the circumstances are such that dying seems like a proud, heroic, profoundly emotionally satisfying thing to do.

For reasons I can't guess at, I don't share this morbid fetish for sacrificing one's life for the good of the country.  I've always thought the important thing was to live and thus go on contributing to the experiment, and, like Patton, to succeed by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country.  I consider death to be a pretty stupid way to contribute to anything; and that there is nothing sadder than a corpse, no matter what it died for.

Death, however, is inevitable.  And part of the process of moving from childishness to maturity is to recognize the fact of death, without the glitz and romanticism that a fetishist adds to make it palatable.  I'm not glad when a character dies in a film or a book.  I am reconciled to it.  I acknowledge that I can't change it.  In the light of friends and family passing away, at this awful time or any other, I accept there is nothing I can do about it.  I don't look for reason.  I don't ask to be recompensed with rhetoric or foolishness.

I know from observance that the game is a dead cat bounce without the ever-present spectre of death.  I don't like killing a player character; and I don't like having to take a hard stand with a player when they resist that finality.  But being a good DM is not all beer and skittles.  Being a good DM demands the ability to look your friend in the face and say, "You lost this one.  You're going to have to get over it."  And knowing, maturely, that within a few weeks, they will get over it, and appreciate the positive qualities that imminent threat adds to the game, making the game both terrifying and magnificent, because it includes loss as part of its fabric.

It is a very shallow person who believes they're serving their friends by eternally protecting them from harm.  Avoiding happiness is not the road to happiness.  People who are afraid of death are afraid of life.