Arthur has plot armor

And, as thou sayest, it is enchanted, son,
For there is nothing in it as it seems
Saving the King; though some there be that hold
The King a shadow, and the city real Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Gareth and Lynette

How should you handle players intentionally or accidentally killing¹ NPCs, given there’s a metaplot of events that are expecting some of those NPCs?

If you want to totally defend a “canonical” timeline or make certain every cool interaction can happen, you can give everything plot armor in any variety of ways. Characters can be unkillable, or their deaths always are revealed to be fake, or so on.

But that can quickly make player actions feel trivial.

If you push for the strongest possible player agency, and characters and stories die ignominiously offscreen just because tiny elements of their original setup got butterflied away - you lose a lot of the rich material that’s out there.

There’s a balance to be made, and a lot of different completely valid places to draw the lines. These all change how you want to tune the game. For example on the extremes:

• With strong plot armor, a legendary knight like Lancelot might simply not be killable - to be effectively an act of God.²
• With strong player agency, the same knight might have to be “fairly” assigned their stats in the same way a player character could get.

My specific balance - and thus what I’m tuning other systems around - is:

Tier 1: Arthur

Arthur has complete plot armor.

• He gets born, which means some couple that is similar to his canonical one³ also has to survive.
• He’s raised in secrecy before drawing the Sword in the Stone.
• He becomes King of the Britons and establishes his peace and order of chivalry. The exact extents of this could vary, but broadly stay the same.
• He dies. The death is also part of the plot armor - nothing can avoid it. It’s also the furthest from the start, so there’s likely variations in exactly what happens - but the core points will always fail the same way: there will be betrayals, hubris, failure and a cycle of violence that can’t hold together.

Tier 2: The Major Tales

Arthur’s plot armor means anything that would seem to deviate things from the path will always snap back somehow. If his father Uther dies, someone else fitting the same role⁴ somehow is in the right spot to be the father instead. If the players rally a large army against Arthur, their usurper king will fail to dislodge him from power forever. If Mordred is strangled in the crib, someone else will kill him.

Arthur is the only character that I think needs that level of control. But some characters and events have a bit of inertia - a doom in the narrative that is heavy and seems to bend back to their canonical way whenever it’s reasonable.

Most of these are protected mainly because they’re important figures, and either unusually strong or well defended. It’s hard to do anything too dramatic while navigating within normal society⁵, and there’s a lot of other influences they’ll have that steer them back to their paths. Like real humans, their actions or roles in the narrative may be influenced heavily by broader events outside their control.

But there’s room for some change. These events could have some major replacements or characters who are consistently and intentionally steered to a different path.

I don’t have an exact list of what fits into this category, but it would include characters like:

• Mordred
• Lancelot & Guinevere
• Perceval
• Balin (for the Dolorous Stroke)
• Tristram & Iseult
• Gawain and the sons of King Lot in general

Tier 3: Side Characters

Then there’s characters that have fun interactions in future events, even if they’re not really important for major roles in events. Or it’s just easier to not figure out how things change without them playing their small roles.

These characters don’t need the world to revolve around them, but when it doesn’t weaken player agency, they can have convenient adjustments back “on track”. This would be pretty much all other named characters and events in the canon.

Tier 4: The Unarmored World

The above categories are all good for players to consider as hard to influence - both to avoid being worried about losing the opportunity to explore those parts of the story, and to feel the influence of the broader world pushing back⁶.

But it’s equally important for players to know that in some places the butterfly effect will be strong and there’s nothing for the world to bounce back to.

Footnotes

1. Or romancing them or anything that might change their direction or character in other ways. ↩

2. A related discussion in rpgs is when an rpg gives a deity a stat block, even if it’s meant to just show that they’re really powerful, it can dramatically shift that they’re killable. “if it bleeds, we can kill it” - if there are completely unchangeable aspects of a setting, the game can make that simple and clearly signaled by just removing any buttons that can change them. ↩

3. i.e. there’s wiggle room to shuffle characters to fit into different archetypes - but we want to make sure the impact on what Arthur’s story is stay the same. ↩

4. As it applies to Arthur, not necessarily as it fills Uther’s other roles in the story. ↩

5. And player characters should care a bit about this. Part of the buy-in is that we want to see how things change, but not just for the sake of randomly making changes to disrupt the storyline. ↩

6. i.e. you can’t change that many things in real life either. We may not believe in wyrd and doom in the same fatalistic way the early English did, but I think everyone feels a little bit of realism in seeing someone who can’t be changed whether or not you want them to, some events in the news or around you that you knew ahead of time couldn’t be avoided. Part of agency is where it won’t matter (or perhaps where it matters anyway). Sometimes making everything depend on the butterfly effect makes the universe revolve unrealistically around the protagonists (like when a romance option in a video game happens to have a type that fits whatever the player picked) - which also can be good in isolation (because these are games and sometimes exaggerating aspects of the world makes it easier to understand), but can need to be balanced to feel real. ↩