Thank you for taking the time to answer. I didn't even know there were multiple. One player of my group recently ordered some rulebooks for something else and they put like a starter book light in there as well. It's like 20 pages. Only War means you pay Guardsmen? That sounds great.

Yup, I also specified Dark Heresy because there's a newer, different 40k RPG, Wrath and Glory, that uses a very different set of mechanics and has an expansion for playing as Eldar. I can't speak about it, haven't taken the time to read or ever had the chance to play

Fair enough but also that’s kind of lame.

And some players just want a chance to play another one of the many characters they made.

I ran WFRP with a set group over several years. The PC death toll by the end was north of a hundred. Even if you try to go easy of them, the nature of the system kills PCs left and right.

So make up any other reason your character has to leave instead of your DM deciding when you are done playing.

That isn't lame, that is just a different playstyle.

Session Zero was also funny, I had a system-neutral list of things people may find triggering and went through it one by one, and the players (who are all more experienced in WFRP than me) kept going "comes with the territorry" on almost every single one.

I GM two groups, both in pathfinder 1e. In one group every player has played three or four characters by now. Death can happen at any time and that is part of the challenge they have to overcome. It's how they prefer it, always having high stacked against them. They are all about min-maxing their builds and finding ways to make my live hard coming up with more or less creative ways to counter their stuff. In the other grou0 the characters have very clear plot armour, which we agreed upon beforehand. The players have developed their characters and take their fun from seeing how the adventures they have changes, develops and fleshed put their characters. They can die, but we agreed beforehand that there always will be a way of coming back from the dead at some point. They just prefer role-playing and their challenge is to solve situations in a way that they as players and their characters feel good about. If they fuck it up in how they approach things they still will kill the bad guy in the end and live trough it, but its the difference between leaving back a smouldering ruin full of corpses or a village that sends them back on their way as heroes. I can appreciate both playstyles and keep them in mind when I give challenges to the two groups. Non feels lame to me. It's just very different ways of playing. It's baseivly the difference between early season game of throes where everything could happen to anybody and the more tradional style of series, where main character almost never die but the story is about their inner growth and how they deal with what the world throws at them.

So, all of the 40K systems follow on from the rough rules template of 2nd edition WFRP, which is a really solid foundation, albeit a bit long in the tooth by modern system design standards. There are 5 games and they all share the same basic core mechanics: * Dark Heresy - Small teams doing investigative work for the inquisition * Rogue Trader - Run a mobile heavily armed nation state doing whatever the fuck you like in space * Deathwatch - SPESS MEHREENS * Black Crusade - CHAOS SPESS MEHREENS * Only War - You're guardsmen, you do war stuff. Only Rogue Trader ever got a 2nd edition, which made the character creation much more flexible and cleaned up some other system stuff. Since then, the license and mechanics have ended up in the hands of the same company that made WFRP 4th Edition, and they've given it more or less the same treatment. My recommendation would be to pick up Imperium Maledictum, which is basically a reworked version of Dark Heresy built around expanding out the concept from "You are acolytes working for an Inquisitor" to "You are some kind of peons working for some kind of patron", with the details being a lot more flexible. So you could be members of the ecclesiarchy working for a powerful minister, low level assassins cult members doing hits, low level mechanicus working for a tech priest... Whatever the GM likes. You can still run Dark Heresy in this framework, but with the flexibility to do other things as well. It's also a cleaner, more modern version of the system, doing away with somewhat archaic ideas like your skill with firearms being a stat just like your strength. It keeps the core ideas of the mechanics, but strips away some cruft and generally creates a cleaner feeling system. My only complaint would be that it badly needs some expansions to up the numbers of available talents (think "Feats" or "Class abilities") as they're kind of the core of how you build a character and right now the small pool feels quite restrictive.

That is reassuring to hear, hope I will keep doing it right in following sessions then.

Oh boy, this sounds fun, how did that last one happen?

Why just another reason? Character death is a perfectly good excuse to switch characters.

Why arbitrarily force your player to make a new character if they are enjoying playing their character?

In first edition there was a huge insanity table, i think he just got an unlucky roll.

The most unlucky option in this case. Sounds like he should become villain of next campaign.

That's why you only do it with players who like trying out new characters.