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Whilst discussing plot armour for 40k characters, I stopped to ponder how I would do it in my game I'm making.

Quick summary of my games system - if you successfully damage an opponent, you place playing cards face-down on them. At the end of the turn, all the cards are flipped and then damage is dealt if the number on the card exceeds their defence. As such, you don't know how much damage you did until the smoke clears and you see what is still standing. Being in cover can help save you from damage, and CC attacks deal face-up cards as you have immediate knowledge of whether that axe connected with metal or flesh.

Now, onto plot armour:

I was pondering allowing a character to only receive a certain amount of damage cards per turn - in that, they can take a hundred (well, 52), but when they are flipped they can choose a certain amount (EG 4) to take and discard the rest. Thus, if you pour more firepower into them, they actually get less likely to take damage due to their heroics - when you watch a movie, it's never in the massive firefight the hero takes damage, but when one guy fires a pistol at him from behind whilst sneering condescendingly. so Plot Armour actually means that the more chaos and explosions there are, the more likely the model is to survive it.

Alternatively I could have it as being half of the cards, so it still scales appropriately. These heroes won't have loads of health, so will need some way of surviving a little better!

What do you think?

I like it. It will be great in a more cinematic game.

I would want to see it in action before I say more though.

I think it might be more interesting to let characters discard the cards before they're flipped, allowing stuff like Viktor's decapitation in Underworld.