Traveller does this in a sense. You don't have hit points in the traditional sense, but rather when you take damage, you apply it against one of your 3 physical attributes which are rolled on 2d6 at character generation. So every character effectively has 6d6 hit points. Your attributes are temporarily reduced while you are damaged, so getting hurt is bad! If you fully lose two of your physical attributes, you are unconscious. Three, you are dead. A bog standard rifle does 3d6 damage, by the way. So combat is fairly intense too!

Paranoia isn't so much "mean" as it is calling your best friend "fuckface" in front of his mom.

Unless your players are complaining about their characters not dying it's probably a bad decision to kill their characters.

There's nothing wrong with running a game explicitly intended to have a chance to kill PCs, as long as everyone is aware of that ahead of time.

While killing PC for the sake of killing them is, usually, abad practice. PC need to feel the risk of dying when doing dangerous stuff. It changes the way you play, if you know that a knife can kill you. Sure your skill mean you'll most likely win the fight or one shot that kid before they move, but if they pull a knife it's not just 1d4 over your 100 HP but a potential injury or death if you don't use your skills

I GM'd WFRP 2e a few times. In one session, a big ram that doubled as a mount for one of the players was slowly becoming a vessel for a daemon, culminating with an attack against the owner. Missed the first attack, but the second was a critical*: 27 points of damage (player characters usually have 12-14 hit points), which made it a one-hit-fatality, ripping the head clean out of the body. I kinda felt bad for the player, but the scene was just too good \* In 2e, criticals are only when rolling for damage. If the D10 comes out 10, it's a critical and you roll again, adding up. Rolling 10s again also count as critical and let you roll again.

The 40k ones that follow on Dark Heresy all play the same way as WFRP: basic attributes with most values being a 0-100 range, lots of skills to sink points in, overall same rules for combat with similar damage and critical damage chart. Mechanically, they're all effectively the same game, changing only the kind of adventures you end up having (depressed soldiers in Only War, lawless space hijinks in Rogue Trader, spehss mareens in Deathwatch, evil corruption and worship in Black Crusade)

Hence Session Zero

Players don't NEED anything. Some players want a challenge and to feel anxious when playing tabletop games. Some don't want the threat of their characters dying, or a stressful experience when hanging out with their friends.

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.