My main intention to include plate armor here was the gameplay reasoning (and my own artistic freedom since it's now built on a totally different game basis).
You can already kill and be killed very easily in DF.
In Books the important characters are protected by plot armor. Boromir takes a lot of arrows and manages to call his horn, both in books and in movies. In DF he would get shot in the head in an instant.
In the game you want yourself or some of your dwarves to be an important character too. However there's no plot armor, so they need some real armor if you want them to survive dozens of uruks with crossbows or any kind of megabeast.
On the bright side, only dwarves have a good plate armor.
All other races wear breastplates, which only cover torso, so a "plate" armor in this mod actually looks like this:
I am also quite surprised that this discussion revived the mod, it was laying without attention for quite a while, no idea why. I would expect more people to be interested in LOTR version of DF
.