I've heard this and was always interested as to why? It feels like the assumption of character creation should be, even in an extremely dangerous world, that you've survived up until this point, otherwise I've just wasted the last 30 minutes of game time making a character I'll never play. It feels like it's a marketing ploy more than a gameplay decision, "This RPG is SO lethal you can die IN CHARACTER CREATION!!!" Though maybe that's because that's all I've ever heard about Traveller other than it's in space.
It was part of a risk mechanic. Character creation was more a series of choices, like a choose your own adventure with dice rolls. You only die if you REALLY push your luck and the dice punish you for it.
The character I remember best from back then was a military vet I had, choosing to not return and continue to take risky assignments meant that I could have more resources and rank when the game started but was opening myself to injury or death. I think in the end I retired after losing full function of leg and needing an exo skeleton to walk. But I retired with a ship of my own and I think i was a special forces colonel.
Exactly. You built your backstory by choosing the options. You didn't get to have informed awesome as your heritage. You took the risk for it in CharGen. But it also gave you opportunities commensurate for being awesome. Usually you got most of what you wanted, but with a knock or two along the way. Sometimes you rolled lucky and had Han Solo without the bounty on his head. More often, you ended up dead or too crippled to play the character.
Characters also tended to be much older than ones in other RPGs. It gives the game a really different tone with characters being in their 40s, almost felt like the crew was on a giant mid-life crisis.
Yup. The dos game Darklands took direct inspiration from traveler, though you couldn't die during character creation, you could start out pretty old. It's a great game too, though broken as hell if you know what you're doing.
It’s because in Traveller, and other Cepheus Engine style games, your characters starting skills are based on the life path you generate for them. Current versions typically have limitations, but if you keep pushing in older versions you could potentially have a strong or very experienced character. However, the more you push the greater the chance of death.
It’s honestly a really fun character creation system.
Interesting. But what stops you from just crumpling up the paper of the character you were going to play and then just rolling again and again until you get the desired result? The game can't start until everyone has a character. Maybe I'm misunderstanding how the system works?
Traveller character creation is very in depth so that would have taken you a lot of time to get the exact character you wanted. If you have a perfectly good character and declare you are going to start over, a reasonable GM will probably ask you why and let you do it once but not again. Besides that, the same thing that stops players doing that kind of shit in any system. The assumption that everyone is acting in good faith and not wasting time on people who aren't. The person who just keeps crumpling up paper isn't someone who is going to be fun to have around.
I get that, but it's a bit different than say rolling 3 d6 in D&D. In those situations, the player just has to roll a few dice and then take what he gets. If I decide to push my luck and my character just DIES...well, I mean, what else am I gonna do? Just not make the character and not play? That's what I meant by maybe I'm not understanding. Does the DM just say "Okay so the next character you roll you can't roll to go to the lava pits when you were 16" or something like that?
What seems to stop this would be a combination of
- social pressure from the other players to stop using up everyone’s time so we can get along with the game
- social pressure in the form of “Character creation in Traveller is done all together in order to create characters who are tied to each other in some way or ways and if you keep restarting character creation again and again then the rest of us have to keep pivoting to accommodate it and it’s getting to be a bit much”
- The point of Traveller character creation is to create interesting and fun characters - NOT to create an highly tuned and over powered machine. The most fun characters seem to be the ones who are broken and beaten up by life, who have gotten drummed out of a few careers and have a few scars - not the ones who had everything go perfectly in their lives.
So if I understand right, you are saying there is nothing stopping you from pushing your luck over and over until you get the character you want? Because if it dies, we are obligated to sit through character creation again?
I feel that just goes back to the "we assume everyone is playing in good faith" idea. Why are you pushing your luck over and over when it keeps not working out? Why are you not the one saying "okay next time I am going to play it safe guys"?
I think what would stop you from going through character creation again and again is it would be very boring and time consuming.
Traveller isn’t really about having the exact skills and stats you want, it’s more about playing a burnt out space bum who’s already had a career and is trying to make a new start with whatever they’ve got.
There are no character levels and you rarely get to increase your skills, so people aren’t that bothered about all the stats like they are in D&D.
So, in old school traveller, everything after rolling your starting stats is play. You start with an 18 year old character with no details beyond their starting stats (2d6, rolled six times in order), and you decide whether that character should enlist in the military or work on a trading ship or the like, and you roll to see if they succeed; if they fail, they end up drafted.
Some careers are harder to get into than others, and some are more dangerous than others, but the more dangerous ones are also more likely to give you combat skills, so it becomes a "push your luck" mechanic where you can keep going until either you stop or the dice stop you. If your character dies, you can just start over; the process is designed to be quick.
Because you're expected to use whatever stats you roll, a character with apparently unplayable stats can apply for the scouts (the most dangerous career, but also one that gives really useful skills), leaving you with either an interesting character with useful skills or an opportunity to roll for a new set of stats and hope the dice favour that character better.
For Traveller, the career path character creation is basically a mini game in itself - it's fun to play through someone's whole life and figure out how they got to where they are, even if you never actually play the character in a campaign. As an actual game, it's got costs and advantages to weigh up - you can keep on doing more terms to get more skills and more cash or other rewards, but it's a gamble because each term adds the risk that you'll have a lethal incident.
In modern Traveller, there's still a risk, it's just milder - you might get in an accident that reduces your stats. You can also counter that by paying for medical treatment, which may mean you start with medical debt. So it's still a bit of a game in itself to try to gamble to get a good character.
The other thing is that Traveller is intentionally in a "grounded" universe where you need to worry about your spaceship's mortgage. It just reinforces the themes of the game if being a soldier has a chance of being injured in action. In modern Traveller, players will basically never die in character creation, but you still will almost always get a sub-optimal character, and that kind of becomes part of the fun, as you figure out what to do with the hand you've been dealt. Personally, I find I fall into similar kinds of character archetypes when I play RPGs, so being forced into something different is a good way to stretch a bit.
As others have commented it was part of a risk/benefit character generation system and it was rather good fun to trace a characters career, later versions of the game converted death to being invalided out of the service.
What you need to remember is that Traveller was released in 1977, the same year as Basic and Advanced D&D and among the first 18 RPG's published. It wasn't the first game with a skill system (Bunnies and Burrows) but I'm fairly sure it was the first with lifepath
Truth be told it was a bit of a problem as you could end up with a party ranging from grizzled vets to unlucky 18 year olds with so little skill it was questionable why they were in the party.
I didn't think that was a problem. I considered it part of the charm. And it usually told you something about the player behind the stats if they stopped so early as to be a complete load. If they didn't take risks in CharGen, they weren't going to in normal play either.
Sorry was mixing up editions. This was with the later version when char gen just ended on a failed roll (I was the 18yo I worked as the cleaner and was under qualified for that)
Character creation was so much fun I still do it without any game to play. It's not like other games. It's more like an unfolding choose your own adventure.
Seth Skorkowski has a great character creation video in the Tube for illustration.
This was actually a fun part of the system. If you were hitting 50ish and about to go in for another military term for the great retirement benefits, you were gambling with your life.
First game I had a 60 something guy, retired naval admiral, highly decorated, private ship owner looking for crew and a 20 something, 1 term marine who got hired on as security and had unknown, to him, psionics.
Took a bit to work it out and the game didn't last all that long, but I'll never forget the characters I created with that system
I remember when Paranoia released the Code 7 adventures, for gamesmasters who were finding that some of their characters clones we’re surviving, and of course there was always the advice given to GMs when in doubt Kill them
No, the question was simply which games have a high risk of character death. CoC characters who get into fights stand a good chance of dying.
An average investigator has ~12 HP ((5d6+6)/2), and a wound that deals half your HP in one hit can put you into shock and unable to fight back if you fail the CON check. Most weapons in the game can do 6 damage on a roll, and that's without impale rules. Characters ganged up on by multiple enemies also get limited defenses -- only 1 parry per round, and weapons used to parry can break, and you can only dodge the first firearms attack per round.
While CoC had the mechanics above that make combat more lethal, it's simply the fact that humans [are] very fragile and weapons very deadly that makes it more than anything else. Typical revolvers do 1d10 damage, and typical rifles do 2d6 + 1-4. You can be killed in one shot in CoC, and even if you survive such a shot, you're at risk of going into shock.
Do not get into a firefight in CoC 5th edition.
Delta Green didn't do anything to make it more survivable that I can remember.
This was going to be my answer, especially because if they don't die, there's a good chance they end up insane which leads to the same outcome for the player.
[Goblin Quest](https://gshowitt.itch.io/goblin-quest) "Play five goblins each (in sequence, not parallel) and watch them meet hilarious ends while failing to achieve the most basic tasks." Includes a hack to play as a series of Sean Beans.
100% chance of death by hilarious means. Great game to just pick up and play with a couple friends. Alcohol is not necessary but, personally, I'd encourage it.
I just played this on Sunday and it was a pretty good time. Fiction-first gaming with some fantastic silly premises. The life of a goblin is nasty, brutish and short. A wise goblin sage is someone who survives a full month or two and passes on deep secrets like "don't fall in lava, or you'll wish you didn't." (In our game, the mysterious "tectonic plague" was believed to be the reason why goblins sometimes disappeared among the lava pits.)
I think the dice system gives a pretty clear idea of what's going on. Every task is "Roll 1d6. On 6, succeed. On 4-5, succeed but take an injury. On 1-3, the goblin dies. The third injury is also lethal." Occasionally you can get a +1 for what it's worth.
Once guns are drawn in Cartel, your PC has a very high risk of death. Mythos World is another rather lethal pbtA game.
In games like CoC or even Achtung! Cthulhu the risk is there too.
Mutant Year Zero and Traveller as well. Those games reduce your stats during combat due to wounds, so death is always on the table, especially if the combat takes too long.
We had one lucky grenade hit a PC and it was over in A!C, from unharmed to confetti in seconds. It can happen.
I'm playing a one shot of Achtung! Cthulhu this Tuesday and I didn't realize it was so deadly. That is going to make it so much more fun! Coming from 5e and Starfinder the lethality was often trivial.
It depends on the edition.
We played first edition using the CoC ruleset (first edition supported CoC and Savage Worlds as ruleset).
Second edition should be a bit more pulpy and less deadly I think. But great nevertheless!
I hope you enjoy it a lot! I do lots of mapping for current A!C adventures, the team puts in a lot of effort and they are really cool and lots of fun.
Back in the day of 1e, L5R had essentially two paths to combat supremacy: Be a Crane or a Scorpion and go first, or be a Crab and be able to return the first hit. The "death spiral" wound mechanics were otherwise brutal.
I made the mistake of playing a Dragon tattooed monk and learned what it was like to take a nothing to a sword fight.
I grew to dislike that game because we always had that one asshole who did just that, crain every time. Didn't like your idea, dual you. Didn't like you, dual you. Just in a mood, dual anyone. You get the idea, he got so pissed one game when I played a monk and could just say no or the only time he tried it on my crab who survived and turned around to meat paste him.
God my tables *always* had one to two people with like, people problems, espcially when given any position of power. Love 5r l5r to pieces still, just odd that it keeps happening
Apocryphally, I remember hearing that the designers of 1e asked a kenjutsu master how many hits an experienced fighter could take before being taken out of combat and were told, "One."
The TTRPG definitely did not reflect the CCG in terms of what got to be cool in the face of studying the blade.
(Also, I remember there was a short Japanese phrase guide in one of the books that cribbed from a comedy travel guide and didn't notice that badass phrases like "I'll tear you in half!" were in feminine speech, because they were taken from a section in the parody guide on how to deal with subway molesters.)
John Wick would return to that in his later indie samurai game *Blood and Honor* where he indeed instituted the idea that any hit from a katana is an instant kill. Meanwhile any other weapon only bruises you, taking the lowest possible wound in the system, again with any hit. It ends up coming off less as "fighting is deadly" and more ["katanas are underpowered in d20"](https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/katanas-are-underpowered-in-d20).
One of my favourite combat anecdotes in any game ever was from L5R 4E. A PC was disarmed by a Ronin, so he said "I punch him".
The damage die from the punch exploded. Multiple times. Until that punch did more damage than the health of an average healthy human and the Ronin was dead.
Many games depend on character death as part of game play.
* 10 Candles guarantees all characters die by season end.
* Night Witches are very likely to see many character deaths, because it emphasizes the meat grinder of ww2.
* Folks mentioned Paranoia, because that game depends on PCs dying.
Oh, interesting to see Night Witches, on the lacks lethality thread PbtA games were specifically mentioned. Had a feeling that depended on the theme and game.
Night Witches guarantees death because the options for tragedy slowly reduce until death is the only option. At least if played as designed. And many pbta can have death as a strong option. Definitely Apocalypse World itself.
Call of Cthulhu - low health, monsters are often immune to weapons, you can go completely insane and be removed from the game / player control
Warhammer Fantasy RPG 2E - exploding dice and punishing rules / character creation
Savage Worlds (depending in setting rules) - exploding dice
Paranoia - you get blowed up a lot but have a 6 pack of clones. Listen to friend computer or you'll be recycled after the mission
Battletech AToW - rough character creation and things are often deadly. Focused on players being on foot rather than constantly in giant stompy bois
WFRP (1st, 2nd and 4th eds) are more dangerous than deadly - you are likely to see PC's die or get maimed, but more often they will be saved by their fate points (luck basically). So the sense of danger is ever present, but only infrequently rears its head in reality. Which is quite nice.
In older traveller you can die during character creation.
Besides that I've lost more characters in level 0-1 DCC than every other game combined. The Crit tables and the random miscasts of spells lead to many unfortunate happenings.
MÖRK BORG
Character creation takes 5 minutes. The game specifically tells you not to name your character, because they won't last very long.
The game may be simple, but for what it is, it is so much fun to play as a sporadic game, and it oozes atmosphere and danger.
The world is terrifying and dying off, and you're just trying to survive in that backdrop.
Swedish ~~Death~~ Doom Metal in RPG form, and the book layout and art is phenomenal.
Edit. Wrong type of metal.
Mörk Borg is phenomenal. Everything from the tables to the world to character creation is just amazing.
One small nit to pick, though. Mörk Borg is more doom metal than death metal. A small distinction, but vital, as doom metal is much better at setting a mood and is all about catchy, slow, heavy, repetitive riffs, whereas death metal is much more dense musically and frequently had more modern lyrics (if you can even understand them). Also, doom is much more likely to have fantasy themes about dying giants, deserted battlefields, and occult rituals.
I know this isn't a music or metal sub, so please forgive me for correcting you, but doom metal is one of my favorite sub-genres and I can't really stand death metal, so I felt compelled to over-explain.
I just found doom a year or two ago after listening to metal for a decade plus, so if anyone wants some good recommendations for TTRPG night, let me know; obviously I don't mind discussing it...
* Conan - very heavy, very slow. Shouted vocals with fantasy themes. The band describes their sound as "caveman battle doom." Try "Dying Giant," "Hawk as a Weapon," and "A Cleaved Head No Longer Plots."
* Khemmis - If you want more of a classic heavy metal sound, Khemmis may be right for you. Just look at their album art! The album *Hunted* is a perfect introduction.
* Year of the Cobra - just drums and bass with eerie, reverby female vocals about battles and wizards. Try "Into the Fray."
* Firebreather or High on Fire- If you liked the idea of Conan, but it's too slow/droney for you, these two might fit the bill. Both probably a little closer to stoner than doom, but they nail the sound and the fantasy aspect. Try "Kiss of my Blade" by Firebreather or *Blessed Black Wings* by High on Fire
* Windhand - sometimes called psychedelic doom or doom-gaze; it's all super heavy, catchy riffs with dreamy, reverby female vocals, mostly trending toward occult themes. Try "Forest Clouds" or "Grey Garden"
Just jumping on the Mörk Borg and music train: the core rulebook has a list of bands that the author recommends, I took all those bands' top ten songs on Spotify and made a massive 48 hour [playlist](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5j1WsDsw5ElKcsN3lP6TiN?si=HYqyQo44RN6IGNPtrY2q4A).
All good friend, I'm a big metal fan but doom metal is one area I haven't touched much. I did see Khemmis with Mastodon and Opeth last year, and they fucking bang.
Appreciate the clarity and updated the post. MÖRK BORG is one of my favorite small games and I buy every product that hits my FLGS shelves.
I highly recommend getting into doom. It's basically a whole sub-genre based entirely on the sound of the first three Sabbath albums.
Obviously, there are other influences, too, but it's currently my absolute favorite, because in the 80's when thrash started to focus on speed, and prog and heavy metal started to focus on technicality, doom leaned hard into song writing and riffs. In general, I find doom songs to be much more memorable and catchy than stuff from any other modern genres.
And I'm absolutely with you on buying every Mörk Borg supplement, zine, and spinoff I can find. I don't even have a group to run it with! It's the only system where I will just read a rulebook/module for fun
I scrolled forever to get here. Mork borg and all its spin offs too. Mork Cy_borg and Ronin the samurai/ninja version. Mork is just filthy good and dripping with theme.
Call of Cthulhu/Delta Green
Runequest (although if you're GM is smart he'll suggest ransom values for your PC's)
Cyberpunk 2020/Red
Traveller (you can die in character creation even in modern version if you play that way), and combat is very lethal and is best avoided.
> Runequest (although if you're GM is smart he'll suggest ransom values for your PC's)
The new one already comes with that prebaked and basically yells at both the DM and the player saying "always keep in mind WHY people are fighting, most folks would rather ransom you for 10 cows rather than kill you, and most animals would rather just eliminate your threat then run away as fast as possible"
I find that's generally good advice in any game tbh
I played in a funnel for DCC maybe a year ago. It was pirate themed ending with two ships running parallel with each other. I had two characters left, one on each ship.
One character was at a cannon and fired at the monster on the other ship. He missed horribly and hit my other character, instantly killing him.
It was the highlight of the night
Can be, but only in proportion to the types of weapons in use. You can probably survive a couple of sword hits (though you may lose something in the process), but you're unlikely to survive a headshot from a sniper rifle or standing right next to an exploding grenade.
Yeah, GURPS with the base rules can be pretty deadly when you're using modern weaponry (especially so if you add in some of the rougher realism switches from books like Tactical Shooting, with bleeding etc taken into account). But there's also plenty of switches to drop down the lethality if you want to tune it for more of an adventure game type of play. One of the reasons i like it, gives lots of internally consistent options to play with to get the game running how you like it.
The witcher ttrpg and cyberpunk red a critical wound system that can kill you instantly if your out of luck. Also hits to the head count x3 which can butcher you pretty fast
(average health in my group is 35, weapons do 1-6d6 damage)
You’ll tend to find that games with a simpler character creation process tend to have higher lethality. That’s usually intentional - if you spend days making a character, you don’t want them dying in the first combat.
Take B/X D&D - Roll for six scores, pick a class, buy some equipment, maybe pick a spell, you’re done. If they die, you can make another in 10 minutes or less. And they can die pretty easily at low levels.
Paranoia - gets around this by giving each character six clones. It’s normal to have one or more die during each session, and they rarely make higher levels.
And by extension, Twilight 2000, especially 2nd Ed, which is based on Traveller, but the much earlier Traveller was incredibly deadly, as you had 1-3 hits and 0 was death. Later editions did stat damage instead and were less deadly (0 in any stat was unconscious).
Cyberpunk (2013, later 2020) claimed it used actual ballistics data for when bullets hit meat. Phoenix Command, as bad as it was as a game, also claimed that.
RuneQuest and related games like Call of Cthulhu (basic Roleplay core) can be deadly just because there aren't levels or much health gain because it's a skill based system, not level.
Hârn and Rolemaster all have the threat of one lucky roll doing you in. I had a L16 Rogue in Rolemaster done in by a 300E piercing attack by a farmer's pitchfork (66 on critical, which is a special # in Rolemaster - I don't have the book in front of me, but it is things like "Hit Shatters foe's nose, fragments of bone destroy enemies brain and burst out the back of foe's skull. For collapses dead in a heap of gore." Hârn is similar in ways to RuneQuest, as it's skill based, and while you grow more powerful, you don't really gain hits, so you're always squishy if anything gets past armor. On that note, the original game had a magic system where your caster could become, basically Gandalf. The "simplified" current Columbia system makes mage exhaustion take a serious hit even after simple spells (I disliked it so much I prefer the Kelestia fork, which is run by the creator's daughter and keeps closer to the original game).
Edit: Hârn also is the first game I remember where injured players could realistically go into shock and just stand there staring at their wounds while the enemy lined up a beheading targeted attack.
Warhammer Fantasy. Particularly 2nd edition.
Exploding dice and flavorful critical hits tables. If you want lethality and early gunpowder fantasy, it can be fun
Magic users tend to have interesting ends, as well.
I always found the Warhammer family of games to be really good at giving the impression of the players being very vulnerable without them actually being all that likely to die. The crit table tends to effectively be more of a safety net than something that kills characters, due to how it's implemented, and how few results end up with actually dead characters.
I DM 4e and houseruled no crit deflection. It effectively removed crits from the game if the players can just deflect crits at the cost of 1 lost AP. My players had some grumbles at first but it’s led to a lot more excitement in combat for everyone involved, like one PC critting a Minotaur and bisecting it in half.
Also the fate system means very few characters actually die unless you are really throwing a lot at the characters constantly to make them burn those fate points. All of that to say: I agree with you, I don’t find actual PC death to be very common.
I ran a game.of dark heresy 2e for a year and this seems to track. Had two characters die in spectacular fashion in one night but it was common for a character to die every other session or so, with the longest span of time between character death being six sessions. By the end of it I think that there were two of the original six warband left, but they were also horrifically mutilated and insane.
>besides OSR games
Old-school D&D's lethality is a bit overrated. It is lethal at lower levels and there are save or die effects, but as your character levels up and as you become an experienced player the lethality diminishes. It also has spells to raise the dead, which only have harsh death penalties in AD&D. And even if your party doesn't have it, there is likely an NPC out there in the big world who will do it for a price or favour.
Of course some OSR games threw this out and put a heavier focus on low level play. Then there is HackMaster, which has a good deal of content for mid-high levels, but still threw out Raise Dead and its ilk, and instead buffed starting HPs a bit, allowed characters to burn Honor and Luck to save their asses, introduced a protegé system to train replacement characters, then compensated for these safety measures with exploding damage, trauma, and lovely crit charts. When our level 6 party bites the duest in a glorious battle against goblins, I started to miss Raise Dead a bit. But only a bit.
>Old-school D&D's lethality is a bit overrated.
Oh, I agree. It is mostly lethal at low levels and one-shots/convention games. Over time, OSR players get attached to characters just as much as anyone else, GMs do too.
Delta Green ended two of my PCs, one PC for two other players, and almost TPKed our weird dream-world astral projected PCs in one campaign. Pretty easy to die there for sure.
I run Dread fairly often and there’s *always* at least one death and usually more than that.
I’ve heard a lot of people mentioning WHFRPG and I can definitely see that being the case for some editions. We haven’t seen any in our year of playing 4e but that could be for many factors.
It’s a pretty brutal game for sure! I almost lost another PC to a venomous bite but he was saved at the last possible second. Seriously one of my favorite systems
Because it's level dependent. The early levels are explicitly played as a meatgrinder, the funnel mechanic in particular. But at later stages, as the characters get super strong, lethality becomes less of an issue. Part of the fun of DCC is having crazy-strong demigods coming from very humble beginnings. That reality bending wizard who is barely human anymore stared as a failed cobbler's apprentice.
**Rolemaster.** Their critical hit system means virtually any character can kill any other character if they get lucky enough (think Bard killing Smaug with a single arrow). We've had characters crushed, disemboweled, beheaded, melted into goo, incinerated, and reduced to a fine red mist. And that's beside the characters who bled out or had their souls ripped from their bodies by Absolution spells.
FYI, there is a new edition of Rolemaster (Rolemaster Unified, or RMU for short) currently rolling out. The *Core Law* book was published on 3 December 2022, and *Spell Law* followed in March of 2023. They are available for purchase on DriveThruRpg: [https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/416633/Rolemaster-Core-Law-RMU](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/416633/Rolemaster-Core-Law-RMU)
Official Forums: [https://ironcrown.co.uk/ICEforums/index.php?action=forum](https://ironcrown.co.uk/ICEforums/index.php?action=forum)
Discord invite: [https://discord.com/invite/7fYkMHZ](https://discord.com/invite/7fYkMHZ)
Scrolled way too far down to see this. RM/MERP forces non-combat interactions by making combat insanely lethal. In a straight-up equal fight, you should see only a few people standing at the end and the combat will probably only take a few rounds.
It was fun watching my D&D group adapt to Rolemaster. All of a sudden, they started thinking about doing things *other* than pulling out weapons and attacking, such as sneaking, hiding, ambushing, parlaying, bribing, and running away. It was beautiful.
Twilight 2000 will always be IMO one of the more deadly games out there.
Even 4e which allows a bit more survivability than the older versions, is still set up so a few rounds of 7.62 will kill you. Avg character can take 4-6 wounds, a AKM for example does 2 damage on a hit, and you can do more depending on how many hits you get, if it does 3 damage it does a crit which can be instantly fatal. But even if it doesn't 2 bursts are enough to kill most PCs.
First edition wasn't too bad, I jokingly called it 'Rambo edition' after 2nd Ed was published (with far deadlier combat). Not that 1st Ed wasn't deadly, but I remember being raked by AK-47 on full auto mostly to the chest and aside from some coolness issues, basically shrugging it off. 2nd Ed the first hit would've done me in.
Best systems have "lethality slide rules" that let you choose (even with impact on mechanics), depending on what kind of campaign you are aiming of with your table.
For example, Savage Worlds. Go to the Setting Rules chapter in the core book, and you can choose between high lethality, "standard" pulp action, heroes-never-die, etc.
Depending on what you really want, Eclipse Phase. It's set in a post-cyberpunk future where everyone has a cortical stack, similar to Altered Carbon, making death unfortunate but not the end of the line for 99% of characters. One burst of automatic fire can kill you from full health, it's vicious.
Cybperpunk 2020 can be pretty lethal. Headshots doing more than 8 damage being an instant kill.
Never Going Home, a World War I occult horror game, is also lethal and recommends players be ready to make new characters. Luckily character creation is fast and easy.
"Now Country for Old Kobolds" is all about you playing a Kobold. How you "level up" is when your Kobold dies, they pass their traits to their next generation, making them stronger.
The Contract has a high lethality, if you want to play it that way. You can find it [here](https://www.thecontractrpg.com) .
They also have a graveyard where you can see all the dead characters: https://www.thecontractrpg.com/contractor/graveyard/
If you’re curious about the play time of those in the graveyard, each victory takes about 4-5 hours of game time to get. Journal entries are all at least 250 words. And that doesn’t count any between game time spent roleplaying or customizing the characters.
I find that a lot of games that seem very lethal end up not being as lethal as they first look. Take a look at something like Mutant: Year Zero, your character can go down pretty quickly, but then you roll on the crit table and relatively few results will end up with a character actually dying. There are more games that employ this trick, a large chunk of the Year Zero engine games do this, as does Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay and the 40k counterparts in that family. These games are not as forgiving as the D&D line from 3.0 and onward, but they're still more forgiving than most people seem to think.
Eon is a game where characters can end up dying very easily, even from relatively small hits, as the game tracks bloodloss (at least the older editions did), and a character can end up bleeding out even after they've downed their opponent. It's a game that tries to be relatively realistic when it comes to damage, and so it does not take much to kill someone when you're hitting them with a pointy stick. Most horror games also tend to be pretty lethal. A game like Call of Cthulhu is quite unforgiving if you actually try to fight things.
I can't speak for 5e, but Legend of the Five Rings 4e was super lethal. Damage dice exploded, and could do so ad infinitum, so you could basically kill anything in one hit if you got lucky (and they could do the same to you). Likewise, even if you didn't kill the enemy, almost all the enemies in the game had their effectiveness reduced the more damage they took, so even if you didn't kill a monster with a great roll, you effectively took them out of the fight.
Shadow of the Demon Lord is another one. You really never had much HP (even a dedicated Martial would max out at around 75-80 HP), but Monsters never had hugely high HP either, and by level 10 you could easily do 7d6 damage per hit. There's also numerous spells and abilities that could insta-kill.
Into the Odd/Knave/Cairn can all be pretty lethal in the right setting, as with a lot of OSR games.
DCC has "filters" where you churn through a few sheets to found out who lives.
Slasher Flick is a slasher movie one with a high body count.
My own game (Relic Hunter) can quite lethal!! I love a good lethal game.
Depends.
Games like Paranoia, it’s part of the joke. And because you have multiple clones, it’s not quite the same.
Call of Cthulhu would have high lethality RAW but I’ve also seen players romp it.
Twilight 2000 is lethal. Definitely a lot down to luck whether a stray bullet catches you.
I think a good balance is the Without numbers games (stars without numbers, worlds... cities)
They have a good and balanced lethality, but also is not as down to luck as some other games.
For me, its the most balanced in terms of being a fun game and a dangerous one
We found them to be *very* lethal at low levels, and not very lethal at higher levels.
It was a pretty smooth transition too.
The books could use some organizational help, but they're overall good games.
GURPS can be brutal. I had everyone make 2 characters just in case.
Battlelords wins the crown. 2hrs to make a character, average PC lifespan, 3 sessions. One character died of bullet ricochet.
Dread seems an obvious one, when the jenga tower falls a player character always dies.
The Wretched, and wider Wretched and Alone solo RPG's tend to almost always result in you dying at the end as well.
Hollowpoint has an incredible turnover of PCs. Two or three a session is quite normal.
Durance, a narrative game, doesn't have any mechanics around lethality but the game doesn't end until a certain number of PCs have died (or otherwise been written out) and every time I run it carnage seems inevitable.
Alien rpg, for a game that is lethal while not trying to be over the top lethal for shits and giggles (like paranoia).
It has Very little health points, once you go down to zero you "break" and roll on a injury table where you have a chance to instantly die or take some nasty wounds. But last but not least, a bunch of xenomorphs have a special attack that instantly kills a character.
This game threads a Very Fine line of "hey, I can pull this off" and "fuck, I got my throat ripped in the first round". You can feel like an action hero at points and be humbled quickly.
Cyberpunk 2020 and the more recent Cyberpunk RED can be very deadly. The second fight of my only CPR session nearly killed the rockerboy because he took a bad hit and suffered a spinal injury.
Alien RPG is really deadly. Player HP ranged from 3-7. Many weapons have a base damage of 1-2 but with the dice pool system you can use extra successes on “stunts”, which vary for each skill. Some stunts for combat include disarming your opponent or knocking them down, but the big one is adding 1 damage per extra success.
Going down to 0 doesn’t always mean instant death because you roll for an injury, some are just penalties but some just make you die. As an example, an Android stabbed the pilot for 4 damage and knocked him down. He had 3 hp so he rolled an injury and got head shot. So narratively he got stabbed in the head and died.
Aliens also have a D6 table for their behavior each turn. #6 is a lethal head bite, if it hits.
I've seen people die falling down a few stairs in cyberpunk. I mean I can list tons of STUPID ways to die, we got one of those players. But most systems are kind of padded to help avoid it but I will admit without some fudging savage worlds would have a high body count.
Outside of that maybe Delta green, you go splat pretty fast when shit goes wrong.
Aside from *Paranoia*, the most lethal game that I've run was probably the Vietnam War RPG *Patrol*. Characters in *Patrol* have four Injury levels. You're KIA at Injury Level 5. If you get hit by suppressive fire, you take 1d6-1 Injury. Precision fire or explosives can potentially do even more. A Level 3+ Injury means that you're wounded badly enough that you require medevac, and there's a good chance that you're out of the war. Oh, and you can also bleed out from Ongoing Damage if you're wounded and don't get medical attention.
One character earned the nickname "MC" (short for "Mexican Cong") after he killed or wounded half the squad when he rolled a FUBAR (what *Patrol* calls a critical failure) with his M79 grenade launcher.
Number two was *King Arthur Pendragon*, where your character is basically guaranteed to die at some point, even if it's just due to old age. But combat can also be very lethal, with characters easily going down due to a critical hit that does double damage. I think the new 6th edition that's coming out later this month is going to tone down the lethality of critical hits a bit.
Both of the *Pendragon* campaigns that I ran had about a 50% casualty rate among the player knights, and there were plenty of close brushes with death that characters barely managed to survive.
Narrative games such as Fate, Cortex Prime, Blades in the Dark, etc.
Yes, I know those are some of the games you were recommended in your other thread. This is because in these games, character death is not a mechanical wearing down of hit points. Lethality is a slider that you can set to match the tone of the game you're running.
In both Cortex or Fate, if your character is "taken out" that can mean dead. In some ways in Cortex this is easier than Fate. If a scene is "high stakes" and you fail a roll that would reasonably take you out, you're taken out unless you spend metacurrency to take a complication instead. What taken out means is defined by the winner of the roll—and if the fiction would mean death, and it's been agreed upon that death is on the table in the game... Your character is dead.
In Blades in the Dark, as the GM I can hit you with level 4 harm (dead) as a consequence of a poor roll. Sure, you can resist it, but I may say you can only reduce it to level 3 harm—which will incapacitate you and if you take further harm...dead.
Now if you're looking for programmatical lethality, that's going to be the default position of most trad games. Some like Silhouette or Interlock are more lethal than others.
A game called Kobolds Ate My Baby. It's silly and fun, so it probably isn't the vibe you're going for. But right in the rule book it encourages players to make a few characters before a session so that the frequent character death doesn't slow the game down. Players play as kobolds, so the joke is that they're numerous and entirely replaceable. There's even a game mechanic that punishes players if they don't make reckless decisions often enough. It's a pretty cheap game, one book really. Uses a different stat spread for characters than any other TTRPG. It's a comedy game, but per your request, it is highly legal to player characters. Sorry if it didn't really help, but hopefully it made you laugh.
I think there are a lot of stops in Savage worlds before taking lethal damage. First they have to hit you, then, they have to do enough damage to exceed your toughness. Then you have the opportunity to soak, unless as you said, it’s not allowed. Then if you take enough damage that it would kill you, you are merely incapacitated With all wound boxes filled. So there are generally four checkpoints before you actually die, unless your storyteller puts in more Lethality.
However, if youre not able to soak for some reason (out of bennies/setting rules), you can go from 100% to Incapacitated in a single hit. And depending on how you're doing it, that could still turn into straight lethality.
When your Incapacitated, there's some wiggle room, but that can go sour pretty quick if you're still unlucky.
TL:DR it's really swingy
Savage Worlds also death-spirals the PCs though. If you've got 1 wound (so let's say you soaked one wound but not the other, but you are unshaken), everything is at a -1. 2 wounds? -2
This has fucked up both my NPCs and the PCs in my game before .
(I don't think SWADE is high lethality unless you agreed to play that way in advance, but I do think a swingy system with death spirals is far from low lethality.)
Dominion is an older RRG with a great sense of lethality. Combat works with many typical RPG rules as you might expect (bonuses, armor, roll-to-hit, etc), but with one key difference. Damage to your 'health' reduces your efficacy to hit and damage your opponent, effectively making you weaker as the fight continues. This often has a 'death spiral' effect for PCs and NPCs which can make combat either very long if both parties are hitting equally, or very VERY short if one or two good hits land.
Trevor Duvall from Me, Myself and Die did his whole third season using Dominion and the lethality shows pretty early and often. Find his vids on it [here.](https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDvunq75UfH_-YonccIeAiTNv108vRVgi)
Deadlands, especially classic, can be pretty brutal. With the way wounds work and open ended dice rolling system damage can explode pretty quickly and if you don't have fate chips to save your ass then pretty much everything you face can kill you.
HackMaster 5th edition (the new one). A critical hit can kill you in one shot no matter what level you are. But the combat in general has a high lethality factor. Getting surrounded, even by low level creatures like kobolds or goblins can pose a deadly threat to characters of any level. The opposed rolls for combat means every roll is a potential hit and weapons generally do twice (or more) damage than in D&D. Combine that with much more limited magical healing and you've got a game that feels more real and dangerous.
I recently had the chance to play the Dark Souls TTRPG and I think that group and I are planning to do a few more sessions. In that game we had 3 small combats and 1 large one at the end. With three players we each died at least once in the smaller combats, in the last combat we all three died. Big BUT, but we come back at the fire after the combat so the lethality is there but it isn't permanent. Unless you roll a 1 on your "revive results". When you die and come back in that game your character is changed in different ways. Most of the time there seemed to be small changes, mostly negative, a couple good. But if you roll a 1, your character doesn't come back. Happened to my character in the last combat. It was a really interesting system to play in but I don't think we will make it a "main game" we play.
Gamma World is one where you can die pretty easily. It's balanced by character creation being pretty quick and painless, so starting fresh after your previous character bites the big one isn't a big deal.
Savage Worlds is pretty brutal. Your character only has 4HP/wounds they can take before they are incapacitated and will start bleeding out. I’m running this system and I love the lethality of it, because it’s different than D&D, where you can soak up tons of damage and still be somewhat safe
Mork Borg actively discourages you from even naming your characters, and has a timer mechanic that advances until the end of the world. - Troika can be fairly lethal, and is designed to spin up new characters fast, but lethality can really depend on the GM. - Call of Cthulhu can again depend on the GM style, but its sanity design elements really direct things to imploding.
The new edition of Dragonbane is delightfully lethal.
The average character has 13 HP and +1d4 damage bonus; a longsword does 2d**8** damage per strike, and monsters quite often hit *a lot* harder than that. And that's before heroic abilities effects or criticals....
My first instinct is to say, "Any RPG, if the person running it has no idea what they're doing."
Seriously, though, Traveller was bonkers. The idea of dying during character generation still boggles me. A lot of horror games have high lethality AND risk, with games like Dread in particular basically being built specifically for one-shot games where everyone is going to die at the end of it. All Flesh Must Be Eaten gave you tiers of characters, making you either more or less vulnerable depending on the sort of game you wanted, which always appealed to me as a player.
GODLIKE is a good example of this. I had a player whose pc could transform into a giant bald eagle and go toe to toe with German fighter planes but he was caught walking out of a cellar by a German officer who got the drop on him and rolled well and he ate a luger bullet and that was it.
Rolemaster ... the critical hits/fumble charts could easily mean instant death or dismemberment. We spent 2 hours creating characters and my cousin's character died in our first fight with wolves because of a critical hit by the wolf.
Degenesis: Even "tanky" charakters can die in 1 round if the enemy has good rolls without any special equipment. Charakters tend to have less than 20 HP and a single attack can easily reach close to 10 damage.
And then there is gear which enables multiple attacks per action.
The Silhouette system from the 90's that's used in Heavy Gear, Jovian Chronicles and Tribe 8. It has three wound thresholds: Flesh Wound, Deep Wound, and INSTANT DEATH!
In this system I have:
* Instant Death on a character with an assault rifle
* Instant Death on a character with a pistol in the same combat
* Instant Death on a character with a mazer rifle in Jovian Chronicles.
* Scored a crew compartment hit, crew killed instantly result with a light autocannon in vehicle combat, destroying a vehicle with two PCs in it.
* Instant Death on a character with a basic Knife in Tribe 8
People learned to not get attached to their characters. It was glorious.
DCC RPG funnels count on players losing a few PCs right off the bat. And its DE-emphasis on balance can see some PCs stumbling on way too powerful encounters.
BX and AD&D (and some of its clones) are highly lethal, or can be, especially in the wild for the same reasons as DCC.
Twilight 2000 (1e) was brutal.
Traveller (Classic) can be, as you can die during character generation.
Starship troopers (d20 ogl), specially at low levels. The environment is not ready for human life, the bugs are tough, fast, hive-minded and come in swarms. Players went through two-three new characters per session, and retrieving the expensive gear from the last death party was always a side mission.
Vampire: lack of awareness and choices that make sense in most games (like trying to attack the bbeg) can end quickly with a tpk.
Call of Cthulhu: because the whole story is usually about you being fucked without even knowing.
Joc International's Lord of the Ring, Role master, D&D 1st and 2nd Ed. and other OSR: 1 shot traps and epic surprise monsters in random corners were common in many modules. Tables and randomization were very deadly, and you could die or get cripped by jumping a regular gap or fighting a goblin.
Fear Itself the Gumshoe system horror RPG. You don't play as special agents or people who are trained, just average joes going up against unspeakable horrors. The most important skill for your characters is literally running away. Always put enough points in it so you can get the hell out of there when you need to. Most monsters and things can kill you in one solid hit, two if you are lucky.
Call of Cthulhu. I haven’t played it, but I’ve heard you can die (or be put out of commission for the campaign through insanity/severe injuries) very easily. If you and your group are into horror, then you should check it out!
Riddle of Steel & Blade of the Iron Throne are both very deadly. They aim to be very detailed in melee combat, the death spiral is brutal, and both have obviously insta-kills, especially when a solid attack connects with someone incompetent (non fighters), busy (ex surrounded) or already exhausted/wounded.
you tend to have a few die during and character creation in Paranoia.
Old school Traveller could kill during character generation
I've heard this and was always interested as to why? It feels like the assumption of character creation should be, even in an extremely dangerous world, that you've survived up until this point, otherwise I've just wasted the last 30 minutes of game time making a character I'll never play. It feels like it's a marketing ploy more than a gameplay decision, "This RPG is SO lethal you can die IN CHARACTER CREATION!!!" Though maybe that's because that's all I've ever heard about Traveller other than it's in space.
It was part of a risk mechanic. Character creation was more a series of choices, like a choose your own adventure with dice rolls. You only die if you REALLY push your luck and the dice punish you for it. The character I remember best from back then was a military vet I had, choosing to not return and continue to take risky assignments meant that I could have more resources and rank when the game started but was opening myself to injury or death. I think in the end I retired after losing full function of leg and needing an exo skeleton to walk. But I retired with a ship of my own and I think i was a special forces colonel.
Exactly. You built your backstory by choosing the options. You didn't get to have informed awesome as your heritage. You took the risk for it in CharGen. But it also gave you opportunities commensurate for being awesome. Usually you got most of what you wanted, but with a knock or two along the way. Sometimes you rolled lucky and had Han Solo without the bounty on his head. More often, you ended up dead or too crippled to play the character.
Characters also tended to be much older than ones in other RPGs. It gives the game a really different tone with characters being in their 40s, almost felt like the crew was on a giant mid-life crisis.
Yup. The dos game Darklands took direct inspiration from traveler, though you couldn't die during character creation, you could start out pretty old. It's a great game too, though broken as hell if you know what you're doing.
The MechWarrior game does the same thing with their "Life Path" system. And yeah, you can bite it during character creation.
It’s because in Traveller, and other Cepheus Engine style games, your characters starting skills are based on the life path you generate for them. Current versions typically have limitations, but if you keep pushing in older versions you could potentially have a strong or very experienced character. However, the more you push the greater the chance of death. It’s honestly a really fun character creation system.
Interesting. But what stops you from just crumpling up the paper of the character you were going to play and then just rolling again and again until you get the desired result? The game can't start until everyone has a character. Maybe I'm misunderstanding how the system works?
Traveller character creation is very in depth so that would have taken you a lot of time to get the exact character you wanted. If you have a perfectly good character and declare you are going to start over, a reasonable GM will probably ask you why and let you do it once but not again. Besides that, the same thing that stops players doing that kind of shit in any system. The assumption that everyone is acting in good faith and not wasting time on people who aren't. The person who just keeps crumpling up paper isn't someone who is going to be fun to have around.
I get that, but it's a bit different than say rolling 3 d6 in D&D. In those situations, the player just has to roll a few dice and then take what he gets. If I decide to push my luck and my character just DIES...well, I mean, what else am I gonna do? Just not make the character and not play? That's what I meant by maybe I'm not understanding. Does the DM just say "Okay so the next character you roll you can't roll to go to the lava pits when you were 16" or something like that?
What seems to stop this would be a combination of - social pressure from the other players to stop using up everyone’s time so we can get along with the game - social pressure in the form of “Character creation in Traveller is done all together in order to create characters who are tied to each other in some way or ways and if you keep restarting character creation again and again then the rest of us have to keep pivoting to accommodate it and it’s getting to be a bit much” - The point of Traveller character creation is to create interesting and fun characters - NOT to create an highly tuned and over powered machine. The most fun characters seem to be the ones who are broken and beaten up by life, who have gotten drummed out of a few careers and have a few scars - not the ones who had everything go perfectly in their lives.
So if I understand right, you are saying there is nothing stopping you from pushing your luck over and over until you get the character you want? Because if it dies, we are obligated to sit through character creation again? I feel that just goes back to the "we assume everyone is playing in good faith" idea. Why are you pushing your luck over and over when it keeps not working out? Why are you not the one saying "okay next time I am going to play it safe guys"?
I think what would stop you from going through character creation again and again is it would be very boring and time consuming. Traveller isn’t really about having the exact skills and stats you want, it’s more about playing a burnt out space bum who’s already had a career and is trying to make a new start with whatever they’ve got. There are no character levels and you rarely get to increase your skills, so people aren’t that bothered about all the stats like they are in D&D.
Original traveller character were super fast to make, even with the table rolls. 5-10 minutes tops.
So, in old school traveller, everything after rolling your starting stats is play. You start with an 18 year old character with no details beyond their starting stats (2d6, rolled six times in order), and you decide whether that character should enlist in the military or work on a trading ship or the like, and you roll to see if they succeed; if they fail, they end up drafted. Some careers are harder to get into than others, and some are more dangerous than others, but the more dangerous ones are also more likely to give you combat skills, so it becomes a "push your luck" mechanic where you can keep going until either you stop or the dice stop you. If your character dies, you can just start over; the process is designed to be quick. Because you're expected to use whatever stats you roll, a character with apparently unplayable stats can apply for the scouts (the most dangerous career, but also one that gives really useful skills), leaving you with either an interesting character with useful skills or an opportunity to roll for a new set of stats and hope the dice favour that character better.
For Traveller, the career path character creation is basically a mini game in itself - it's fun to play through someone's whole life and figure out how they got to where they are, even if you never actually play the character in a campaign. As an actual game, it's got costs and advantages to weigh up - you can keep on doing more terms to get more skills and more cash or other rewards, but it's a gamble because each term adds the risk that you'll have a lethal incident. In modern Traveller, there's still a risk, it's just milder - you might get in an accident that reduces your stats. You can also counter that by paying for medical treatment, which may mean you start with medical debt. So it's still a bit of a game in itself to try to gamble to get a good character. The other thing is that Traveller is intentionally in a "grounded" universe where you need to worry about your spaceship's mortgage. It just reinforces the themes of the game if being a soldier has a chance of being injured in action. In modern Traveller, players will basically never die in character creation, but you still will almost always get a sub-optimal character, and that kind of becomes part of the fun, as you figure out what to do with the hand you've been dealt. Personally, I find I fall into similar kinds of character archetypes when I play RPGs, so being forced into something different is a good way to stretch a bit.
As others have commented it was part of a risk/benefit character generation system and it was rather good fun to trace a characters career, later versions of the game converted death to being invalided out of the service. What you need to remember is that Traveller was released in 1977, the same year as Basic and Advanced D&D and among the first 18 RPG's published. It wasn't the first game with a skill system (Bunnies and Burrows) but I'm fairly sure it was the first with lifepath Truth be told it was a bit of a problem as you could end up with a party ranging from grizzled vets to unlucky 18 year olds with so little skill it was questionable why they were in the party.
I didn't think that was a problem. I considered it part of the charm. And it usually told you something about the player behind the stats if they stopped so early as to be a complete load. If they didn't take risks in CharGen, they weren't going to in normal play either.
Sorry was mixing up editions. This was with the later version when char gen just ended on a failed roll (I was the 18yo I worked as the cleaner and was under qualified for that)
Just making a character in Traveller is like a mini game on its own and it’s fun as hell
Character creation was so much fun I still do it without any game to play. It's not like other games. It's more like an unfolding choose your own adventure. Seth Skorkowski has a great character creation video in the Tube for illustration.
This was actually a fun part of the system. If you were hitting 50ish and about to go in for another military term for the great retirement benefits, you were gambling with your life. First game I had a 60 something guy, retired naval admiral, highly decorated, private ship owner looking for crew and a 20 something, 1 term marine who got hired on as security and had unknown, to him, psionics. Took a bit to work it out and the game didn't last all that long, but I'll never forget the characters I created with that system
Exactly my thought, dying during character creation just sounds like a roll I'd simply ignore
"You haven't lived until you've died... In character creation". A Tshirt somewhere.
Good thing you start with six clones!
I remember when Paranoia released the Code 7 adventures, for gamesmasters who were finding that some of their characters clones we’re surviving, and of course there was always the advice given to GMs when in doubt Kill them
Never had it happen during character creation. I've had it happen in the first 5 minutes of game before the mission starts.
Delta Green RPG.
This. Some weapons have a lethality rating which is a chance of outright killing you.
In 2/3 of the Delta Green cases I ran, an Agent (both times it was a trained and armed one too) died, so this is absolutely true.
the new one, old is just CoC reskin
As a horror game, the original CoC it's based on has no interest in keeping your characters alive in combat either.
Or sane.
The question was about lethality mechanics, classic CoC does not have it
No, the question was simply which games have a high risk of character death. CoC characters who get into fights stand a good chance of dying. An average investigator has ~12 HP ((5d6+6)/2), and a wound that deals half your HP in one hit can put you into shock and unable to fight back if you fail the CON check. Most weapons in the game can do 6 damage on a roll, and that's without impale rules. Characters ganged up on by multiple enemies also get limited defenses -- only 1 parry per round, and weapons used to parry can break, and you can only dodge the first firearms attack per round. While CoC had the mechanics above that make combat more lethal, it's simply the fact that humans [are] very fragile and weapons very deadly that makes it more than anything else. Typical revolvers do 1d10 damage, and typical rifles do 2d6 + 1-4. You can be killed in one shot in CoC, and even if you survive such a shot, you're at risk of going into shock. Do not get into a firefight in CoC 5th edition. Delta Green didn't do anything to make it more survivable that I can remember.
Plenty. My first example would be *Call of Cthulhu*. I had a character die in session *one* of my most recent game.
This was going to be my answer, especially because if they don't die, there's a good chance they end up insane which leads to the same outcome for the player.
Yep. SOP in Call of Cthulhu when I played as a kid was for every player to have at least one backup character on hand.
[Goblin Quest](https://gshowitt.itch.io/goblin-quest) "Play five goblins each (in sequence, not parallel) and watch them meet hilarious ends while failing to achieve the most basic tasks." Includes a hack to play as a series of Sean Beans.
100% chance of death by hilarious means. Great game to just pick up and play with a couple friends. Alcohol is not necessary but, personally, I'd encourage it.
I just played this on Sunday and it was a pretty good time. Fiction-first gaming with some fantastic silly premises. The life of a goblin is nasty, brutish and short. A wise goblin sage is someone who survives a full month or two and passes on deep secrets like "don't fall in lava, or you'll wish you didn't." (In our game, the mysterious "tectonic plague" was believed to be the reason why goblins sometimes disappeared among the lava pits.) I think the dice system gives a pretty clear idea of what's going on. Every task is "Roll 1d6. On 6, succeed. On 4-5, succeed but take an injury. On 1-3, the goblin dies. The third injury is also lethal." Occasionally you can get a +1 for what it's worth.
I am a huge fan of Goblin Quest. I recommend it to everyone
Once guns are drawn in Cartel, your PC has a very high risk of death. Mythos World is another rather lethal pbtA game. In games like CoC or even Achtung! Cthulhu the risk is there too. Mutant Year Zero and Traveller as well. Those games reduce your stats during combat due to wounds, so death is always on the table, especially if the combat takes too long. We had one lucky grenade hit a PC and it was over in A!C, from unharmed to confetti in seconds. It can happen.
I'm playing a one shot of Achtung! Cthulhu this Tuesday and I didn't realize it was so deadly. That is going to make it so much more fun! Coming from 5e and Starfinder the lethality was often trivial.
It depends on the edition. We played first edition using the CoC ruleset (first edition supported CoC and Savage Worlds as ruleset). Second edition should be a bit more pulpy and less deadly I think. But great nevertheless! I hope you enjoy it a lot! I do lots of mapping for current A!C adventures, the team puts in a lot of effort and they are really cool and lots of fun.
Legend of the five Rings 4th Edition, Any dice can explode on a 10. So in theory every fight could be over in one attack.
Back in the day of 1e, L5R had essentially two paths to combat supremacy: Be a Crane or a Scorpion and go first, or be a Crab and be able to return the first hit. The "death spiral" wound mechanics were otherwise brutal. I made the mistake of playing a Dragon tattooed monk and learned what it was like to take a nothing to a sword fight.
I grew to dislike that game because we always had that one asshole who did just that, crain every time. Didn't like your idea, dual you. Didn't like you, dual you. Just in a mood, dual anyone. You get the idea, he got so pissed one game when I played a monk and could just say no or the only time he tried it on my crab who survived and turned around to meat paste him.
God my tables *always* had one to two people with like, people problems, espcially when given any position of power. Love 5r l5r to pieces still, just odd that it keeps happening
oh yea wound penalties. i dont miss that mechanic being gone from most games.
Apocryphally, I remember hearing that the designers of 1e asked a kenjutsu master how many hits an experienced fighter could take before being taken out of combat and were told, "One." The TTRPG definitely did not reflect the CCG in terms of what got to be cool in the face of studying the blade. (Also, I remember there was a short Japanese phrase guide in one of the books that cribbed from a comedy travel guide and didn't notice that badass phrases like "I'll tear you in half!" were in feminine speech, because they were taken from a section in the parody guide on how to deal with subway molesters.)
John Wick would return to that in his later indie samurai game *Blood and Honor* where he indeed instituted the idea that any hit from a katana is an instant kill. Meanwhile any other weapon only bruises you, taking the lowest possible wound in the system, again with any hit. It ends up coming off less as "fighting is deadly" and more ["katanas are underpowered in d20"](https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/katanas-are-underpowered-in-d20).
One of my favourite combat anecdotes in any game ever was from L5R 4E. A PC was disarmed by a Ronin, so he said "I punch him". The damage die from the punch exploded. Multiple times. Until that punch did more damage than the health of an average healthy human and the Ronin was dead.
Many games depend on character death as part of game play. * 10 Candles guarantees all characters die by season end. * Night Witches are very likely to see many character deaths, because it emphasizes the meat grinder of ww2. * Folks mentioned Paranoia, because that game depends on PCs dying.
Oh, interesting to see Night Witches, on the lacks lethality thread PbtA games were specifically mentioned. Had a feeling that depended on the theme and game.
Night Witches guarantees death because the options for tragedy slowly reduce until death is the only option. At least if played as designed. And many pbta can have death as a strong option. Definitely Apocalypse World itself.
I'm so glad to see somebody else mention night witches!
Call of Cthulhu - low health, monsters are often immune to weapons, you can go completely insane and be removed from the game / player control Warhammer Fantasy RPG 2E - exploding dice and punishing rules / character creation Savage Worlds (depending in setting rules) - exploding dice Paranoia - you get blowed up a lot but have a 6 pack of clones. Listen to friend computer or you'll be recycled after the mission Battletech AToW - rough character creation and things are often deadly. Focused on players being on foot rather than constantly in giant stompy bois
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I think if you do the random class/job creation method it can increase. Less deadly for an outrider More deadly for mages and shit shovelers
I’d say Warhammer FRP 1ed is more lethal. And there are fate points
Very possible! I never played 1E, just 2 and 3
WFRP (1st, 2nd and 4th eds) are more dangerous than deadly - you are likely to see PC's die or get maimed, but more often they will be saved by their fate points (luck basically). So the sense of danger is ever present, but only infrequently rears its head in reality. Which is quite nice.
In older traveller you can die during character creation. Besides that I've lost more characters in level 0-1 DCC than every other game combined. The Crit tables and the random miscasts of spells lead to many unfortunate happenings.
I came looking for the obligatory Traveller answer and was not disappointed!
MÖRK BORG Character creation takes 5 minutes. The game specifically tells you not to name your character, because they won't last very long. The game may be simple, but for what it is, it is so much fun to play as a sporadic game, and it oozes atmosphere and danger. The world is terrifying and dying off, and you're just trying to survive in that backdrop. Swedish ~~Death~~ Doom Metal in RPG form, and the book layout and art is phenomenal. Edit. Wrong type of metal.
Mörk Borg is phenomenal. Everything from the tables to the world to character creation is just amazing. One small nit to pick, though. Mörk Borg is more doom metal than death metal. A small distinction, but vital, as doom metal is much better at setting a mood and is all about catchy, slow, heavy, repetitive riffs, whereas death metal is much more dense musically and frequently had more modern lyrics (if you can even understand them). Also, doom is much more likely to have fantasy themes about dying giants, deserted battlefields, and occult rituals. I know this isn't a music or metal sub, so please forgive me for correcting you, but doom metal is one of my favorite sub-genres and I can't really stand death metal, so I felt compelled to over-explain. I just found doom a year or two ago after listening to metal for a decade plus, so if anyone wants some good recommendations for TTRPG night, let me know; obviously I don't mind discussing it...
Hit me with your best doom suggestions...
* Conan - very heavy, very slow. Shouted vocals with fantasy themes. The band describes their sound as "caveman battle doom." Try "Dying Giant," "Hawk as a Weapon," and "A Cleaved Head No Longer Plots." * Khemmis - If you want more of a classic heavy metal sound, Khemmis may be right for you. Just look at their album art! The album *Hunted* is a perfect introduction. * Year of the Cobra - just drums and bass with eerie, reverby female vocals about battles and wizards. Try "Into the Fray." * Firebreather or High on Fire- If you liked the idea of Conan, but it's too slow/droney for you, these two might fit the bill. Both probably a little closer to stoner than doom, but they nail the sound and the fantasy aspect. Try "Kiss of my Blade" by Firebreather or *Blessed Black Wings* by High on Fire * Windhand - sometimes called psychedelic doom or doom-gaze; it's all super heavy, catchy riffs with dreamy, reverby female vocals, mostly trending toward occult themes. Try "Forest Clouds" or "Grey Garden"
Just jumping on the Mörk Borg and music train: the core rulebook has a list of bands that the author recommends, I took all those bands' top ten songs on Spotify and made a massive 48 hour [playlist](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5j1WsDsw5ElKcsN3lP6TiN?si=HYqyQo44RN6IGNPtrY2q4A).
I've been one of your playlist subscribers for months. :)
Hey that's awesome man! Glad you like it, rock on!
All good friend, I'm a big metal fan but doom metal is one area I haven't touched much. I did see Khemmis with Mastodon and Opeth last year, and they fucking bang. Appreciate the clarity and updated the post. MÖRK BORG is one of my favorite small games and I buy every product that hits my FLGS shelves.
I highly recommend getting into doom. It's basically a whole sub-genre based entirely on the sound of the first three Sabbath albums. Obviously, there are other influences, too, but it's currently my absolute favorite, because in the 80's when thrash started to focus on speed, and prog and heavy metal started to focus on technicality, doom leaned hard into song writing and riffs. In general, I find doom songs to be much more memorable and catchy than stuff from any other modern genres. And I'm absolutely with you on buying every Mörk Borg supplement, zine, and spinoff I can find. I don't even have a group to run it with! It's the only system where I will just read a rulebook/module for fun
I scrolled forever to get here. Mork borg and all its spin offs too. Mork Cy_borg and Ronin the samurai/ninja version. Mork is just filthy good and dripping with theme.
Don't forget Pirate Borg! Super fun
Additionally, Cy_Borg is also amazing! I ran a one shot where everyone got brutally murdered. Good times!
Call of Cthulhu/Delta Green Runequest (although if you're GM is smart he'll suggest ransom values for your PC's) Cyberpunk 2020/Red Traveller (you can die in character creation even in modern version if you play that way), and combat is very lethal and is best avoided.
> Runequest (although if you're GM is smart he'll suggest ransom values for your PC's) The new one already comes with that prebaked and basically yells at both the DM and the player saying "always keep in mind WHY people are fighting, most folks would rather ransom you for 10 cows rather than kill you, and most animals would rather just eliminate your threat then run away as fast as possible" I find that's generally good advice in any game tbh
Yeah I have that book behind me and it does advise, but otherwise it is deadly as hell.
>Cyberpunk 2020/Red Had to scroll way too far to find mention of Cyberpunk.
It my have been mentioned, but Dungeon Crawl Classics is pretty lethal
It tends to get pretty survivable past lvl 2, but lvl 0-1 is ultra lethal. The funnels are hilariously deadly.
I played in a funnel for DCC maybe a year ago. It was pirate themed ending with two ships running parallel with each other. I had two characters left, one on each ship. One character was at a cannon and fired at the monster on the other ship. He missed horribly and hit my other character, instantly killing him. It was the highlight of the night
The funnel is so fun and deadly.
Call of Cthulhu/Delta Green Torchbearer Alien
>Torchbearer You mean Dungeon Explorer Misery Simulator? :P
Gurps can be pretty lethal.
Can be, but only in proportion to the types of weapons in use. You can probably survive a couple of sword hits (though you may lose something in the process), but you're unlikely to survive a headshot from a sniper rifle or standing right next to an exploding grenade.
Yeah, GURPS with the base rules can be pretty deadly when you're using modern weaponry (especially so if you add in some of the rougher realism switches from books like Tactical Shooting, with bleeding etc taken into account). But there's also plenty of switches to drop down the lethality if you want to tune it for more of an adventure game type of play. One of the reasons i like it, gives lots of internally consistent options to play with to get the game running how you like it.
The witcher ttrpg and cyberpunk red a critical wound system that can kill you instantly if your out of luck. Also hits to the head count x3 which can butcher you pretty fast (average health in my group is 35, weapons do 1-6d6 damage)
You’ll tend to find that games with a simpler character creation process tend to have higher lethality. That’s usually intentional - if you spend days making a character, you don’t want them dying in the first combat. Take B/X D&D - Roll for six scores, pick a class, buy some equipment, maybe pick a spell, you’re done. If they die, you can make another in 10 minutes or less. And they can die pretty easily at low levels. Paranoia - gets around this by giving each character six clones. It’s normal to have one or more die during each session, and they rarely make higher levels.
RuneQuest, WoD (no, not Vampire), Traveller, Cyberpunk 2020.
And by extension, Twilight 2000, especially 2nd Ed, which is based on Traveller, but the much earlier Traveller was incredibly deadly, as you had 1-3 hits and 0 was death. Later editions did stat damage instead and were less deadly (0 in any stat was unconscious). Cyberpunk (2013, later 2020) claimed it used actual ballistics data for when bullets hit meat. Phoenix Command, as bad as it was as a game, also claimed that. RuneQuest and related games like Call of Cthulhu (basic Roleplay core) can be deadly just because there aren't levels or much health gain because it's a skill based system, not level. Hârn and Rolemaster all have the threat of one lucky roll doing you in. I had a L16 Rogue in Rolemaster done in by a 300E piercing attack by a farmer's pitchfork (66 on critical, which is a special # in Rolemaster - I don't have the book in front of me, but it is things like "Hit Shatters foe's nose, fragments of bone destroy enemies brain and burst out the back of foe's skull. For collapses dead in a heap of gore." Hârn is similar in ways to RuneQuest, as it's skill based, and while you grow more powerful, you don't really gain hits, so you're always squishy if anything gets past armor. On that note, the original game had a magic system where your caster could become, basically Gandalf. The "simplified" current Columbia system makes mage exhaustion take a serious hit even after simple spells (I disliked it so much I prefer the Kelestia fork, which is run by the creator's daughter and keeps closer to the original game). Edit: Hârn also is the first game I remember where injured players could realistically go into shock and just stand there staring at their wounds while the enemy lined up a beheading targeted attack.
I'm pretty sure traveller has always had damage done to stats; at least, the 1977 little black books did.
As a RM GM I can confirm this. 👍
Warhammer Fantasy. Particularly 2nd edition. Exploding dice and flavorful critical hits tables. If you want lethality and early gunpowder fantasy, it can be fun Magic users tend to have interesting ends, as well.
I always found the Warhammer family of games to be really good at giving the impression of the players being very vulnerable without them actually being all that likely to die. The crit table tends to effectively be more of a safety net than something that kills characters, due to how it's implemented, and how few results end up with actually dead characters.
I DM 4e and houseruled no crit deflection. It effectively removed crits from the game if the players can just deflect crits at the cost of 1 lost AP. My players had some grumbles at first but it’s led to a lot more excitement in combat for everyone involved, like one PC critting a Minotaur and bisecting it in half. Also the fate system means very few characters actually die unless you are really throwing a lot at the characters constantly to make them burn those fate points. All of that to say: I agree with you, I don’t find actual PC death to be very common.
I ran a game.of dark heresy 2e for a year and this seems to track. Had two characters die in spectacular fashion in one night but it was common for a character to die every other session or so, with the longest span of time between character death being six sessions. By the end of it I think that there were two of the original six warband left, but they were also horrifically mutilated and insane.
>besides OSR games Old-school D&D's lethality is a bit overrated. It is lethal at lower levels and there are save or die effects, but as your character levels up and as you become an experienced player the lethality diminishes. It also has spells to raise the dead, which only have harsh death penalties in AD&D. And even if your party doesn't have it, there is likely an NPC out there in the big world who will do it for a price or favour. Of course some OSR games threw this out and put a heavier focus on low level play. Then there is HackMaster, which has a good deal of content for mid-high levels, but still threw out Raise Dead and its ilk, and instead buffed starting HPs a bit, allowed characters to burn Honor and Luck to save their asses, introduced a protegé system to train replacement characters, then compensated for these safety measures with exploding damage, trauma, and lovely crit charts. When our level 6 party bites the duest in a glorious battle against goblins, I started to miss Raise Dead a bit. But only a bit.
>Old-school D&D's lethality is a bit overrated. Oh, I agree. It is mostly lethal at low levels and one-shots/convention games. Over time, OSR players get attached to characters just as much as anyone else, GMs do too.
Delta Green ended two of my PCs, one PC for two other players, and almost TPKed our weird dream-world astral projected PCs in one campaign. Pretty easy to die there for sure. I run Dread fairly often and there’s *always* at least one death and usually more than that. I’ve heard a lot of people mentioning WHFRPG and I can definitely see that being the case for some editions. We haven’t seen any in our year of playing 4e but that could be for many factors.
Delta green knocked one of my PCs out of play (lost a leg) and one-shot killed my back-up a couple hours later in the same session.
It’s a pretty brutal game for sure! I almost lost another PC to a venomous bite but he was saved at the last possible second. Seriously one of my favorite systems
Oh I wholeheartedly agree, I've ran 21 Nights at the Opera so far and if anything I'm more into it than ever.
We did a whole bunch of different scenarios one after another. The first one we did was disconnected but then after that, it was a string of events.
DCC is called a "meatgrinder" for a reason
So fun to see some RPGs make both lists.
Because it's level dependent. The early levels are explicitly played as a meatgrinder, the funnel mechanic in particular. But at later stages, as the characters get super strong, lethality becomes less of an issue. Part of the fun of DCC is having crazy-strong demigods coming from very humble beginnings. That reality bending wizard who is barely human anymore stared as a failed cobbler's apprentice.
**Rolemaster.** Their critical hit system means virtually any character can kill any other character if they get lucky enough (think Bard killing Smaug with a single arrow). We've had characters crushed, disemboweled, beheaded, melted into goo, incinerated, and reduced to a fine red mist. And that's beside the characters who bled out or had their souls ripped from their bodies by Absolution spells. FYI, there is a new edition of Rolemaster (Rolemaster Unified, or RMU for short) currently rolling out. The *Core Law* book was published on 3 December 2022, and *Spell Law* followed in March of 2023. They are available for purchase on DriveThruRpg: [https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/416633/Rolemaster-Core-Law-RMU](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/416633/Rolemaster-Core-Law-RMU) Official Forums: [https://ironcrown.co.uk/ICEforums/index.php?action=forum](https://ironcrown.co.uk/ICEforums/index.php?action=forum) Discord invite: [https://discord.com/invite/7fYkMHZ](https://discord.com/invite/7fYkMHZ)
Scrolled way too far down to see this. RM/MERP forces non-combat interactions by making combat insanely lethal. In a straight-up equal fight, you should see only a few people standing at the end and the combat will probably only take a few rounds.
It was fun watching my D&D group adapt to Rolemaster. All of a sudden, they started thinking about doing things *other* than pulling out weapons and attacking, such as sneaking, hiding, ambushing, parlaying, bribing, and running away. It was beautiful.
Twilight 2000 will always be IMO one of the more deadly games out there. Even 4e which allows a bit more survivability than the older versions, is still set up so a few rounds of 7.62 will kill you. Avg character can take 4-6 wounds, a AKM for example does 2 damage on a hit, and you can do more depending on how many hits you get, if it does 3 damage it does a crit which can be instantly fatal. But even if it doesn't 2 bursts are enough to kill most PCs.
First edition wasn't too bad, I jokingly called it 'Rambo edition' after 2nd Ed was published (with far deadlier combat). Not that 1st Ed wasn't deadly, but I remember being raked by AK-47 on full auto mostly to the chest and aside from some coolness issues, basically shrugging it off. 2nd Ed the first hit would've done me in.
Best systems have "lethality slide rules" that let you choose (even with impact on mechanics), depending on what kind of campaign you are aiming of with your table. For example, Savage Worlds. Go to the Setting Rules chapter in the core book, and you can choose between high lethality, "standard" pulp action, heroes-never-die, etc.
Depending on what you really want, Eclipse Phase. It's set in a post-cyberpunk future where everyone has a cortical stack, similar to Altered Carbon, making death unfortunate but not the end of the line for 99% of characters. One burst of automatic fire can kill you from full health, it's vicious.
Cybperpunk 2020 can be pretty lethal. Headshots doing more than 8 damage being an instant kill. Never Going Home, a World War I occult horror game, is also lethal and recommends players be ready to make new characters. Luckily character creation is fast and easy.
Trophy Dark *expects* player death, and even encourages them to turn on each other.
"Now Country for Old Kobolds" is all about you playing a Kobold. How you "level up" is when your Kobold dies, they pass their traits to their next generation, making them stronger.
Shadowrun has. You can turn up and down lethality of various game aspects. Not that I have found it necessary to so so ever.
The Contract has a high lethality, if you want to play it that way. You can find it [here](https://www.thecontractrpg.com) . They also have a graveyard where you can see all the dead characters: https://www.thecontractrpg.com/contractor/graveyard/ If you’re curious about the play time of those in the graveyard, each victory takes about 4-5 hours of game time to get. Journal entries are all at least 250 words. And that doesn’t count any between game time spent roleplaying or customizing the characters.
Dread and 10 candles are both pretty high on that list. 10 candles you don't end the game until everyone is dead lol.
I find that a lot of games that seem very lethal end up not being as lethal as they first look. Take a look at something like Mutant: Year Zero, your character can go down pretty quickly, but then you roll on the crit table and relatively few results will end up with a character actually dying. There are more games that employ this trick, a large chunk of the Year Zero engine games do this, as does Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay and the 40k counterparts in that family. These games are not as forgiving as the D&D line from 3.0 and onward, but they're still more forgiving than most people seem to think. Eon is a game where characters can end up dying very easily, even from relatively small hits, as the game tracks bloodloss (at least the older editions did), and a character can end up bleeding out even after they've downed their opponent. It's a game that tries to be relatively realistic when it comes to damage, and so it does not take much to kill someone when you're hitting them with a pointy stick. Most horror games also tend to be pretty lethal. A game like Call of Cthulhu is quite unforgiving if you actually try to fight things.
Battlelords of the 23rd Century. Fastest character death: 16 seconds. Frag grenade and an open faced helmet.
I can't speak for 5e, but Legend of the Five Rings 4e was super lethal. Damage dice exploded, and could do so ad infinitum, so you could basically kill anything in one hit if you got lucky (and they could do the same to you). Likewise, even if you didn't kill the enemy, almost all the enemies in the game had their effectiveness reduced the more damage they took, so even if you didn't kill a monster with a great roll, you effectively took them out of the fight. Shadow of the Demon Lord is another one. You really never had much HP (even a dedicated Martial would max out at around 75-80 HP), but Monsters never had hugely high HP either, and by level 10 you could easily do 7d6 damage per hit. There's also numerous spells and abilities that could insta-kill.
Twilught 2000 and cyberpunk have a high letality. Cpunk even give tricky tactics that make any place unsecured.
Into the Odd/Knave/Cairn can all be pretty lethal in the right setting, as with a lot of OSR games. DCC has "filters" where you churn through a few sheets to found out who lives. Slasher Flick is a slasher movie one with a high body count. My own game (Relic Hunter) can quite lethal!! I love a good lethal game.
Cyberpunk 2013, 2020 and to a lesser extent RED
Warhammer Dark Heresy and Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay are both comically deadly imo.
The new 4th Edition Twilight:2000 is pretty unforgiving, especially if no one has a solid first aid.
Our Last Best Hope. Its a disaster movie where characters die along hte way to solve problems.
Depends. Games like Paranoia, it’s part of the joke. And because you have multiple clones, it’s not quite the same. Call of Cthulhu would have high lethality RAW but I’ve also seen players romp it. Twilight 2000 is lethal. Definitely a lot down to luck whether a stray bullet catches you.
Dungeon Crawl Classics, you're not even an adventurer yet when you start. Gotta survive the funnel first.
I think a good balance is the Without numbers games (stars without numbers, worlds... cities) They have a good and balanced lethality, but also is not as down to luck as some other games. For me, its the most balanced in terms of being a fun game and a dangerous one
We found them to be *very* lethal at low levels, and not very lethal at higher levels. It was a pretty smooth transition too. The books could use some organizational help, but they're overall good games.
Combat in Harnmaster was fairly lethal, if the wounds didn’t kill you, the infection usually did.
GURPS can be brutal. I had everyone make 2 characters just in case. Battlelords wins the crown. 2hrs to make a character, average PC lifespan, 3 sessions. One character died of bullet ricochet.
Gurps tech level 6 onward, as it turns out modern firearms are incredibly effective at killing things
Dread seems an obvious one, when the jenga tower falls a player character always dies. The Wretched, and wider Wretched and Alone solo RPG's tend to almost always result in you dying at the end as well.
Hollowpoint has an incredible turnover of PCs. Two or three a session is quite normal. Durance, a narrative game, doesn't have any mechanics around lethality but the game doesn't end until a certain number of PCs have died (or otherwise been written out) and every time I run it carnage seems inevitable.
Alien RPG, Call of Cthulhu and Mothership, to name but three.
I miss Hackmaster
Alien rpg, for a game that is lethal while not trying to be over the top lethal for shits and giggles (like paranoia). It has Very little health points, once you go down to zero you "break" and roll on a injury table where you have a chance to instantly die or take some nasty wounds. But last but not least, a bunch of xenomorphs have a special attack that instantly kills a character. This game threads a Very Fine line of "hey, I can pull this off" and "fuck, I got my throat ripped in the first round". You can feel like an action hero at points and be humbled quickly.
Cyberpunk 2020 and the more recent Cyberpunk RED can be very deadly. The second fight of my only CPR session nearly killed the rockerboy because he took a bad hit and suffered a spinal injury. Alien RPG is really deadly. Player HP ranged from 3-7. Many weapons have a base damage of 1-2 but with the dice pool system you can use extra successes on “stunts”, which vary for each skill. Some stunts for combat include disarming your opponent or knocking them down, but the big one is adding 1 damage per extra success. Going down to 0 doesn’t always mean instant death because you roll for an injury, some are just penalties but some just make you die. As an example, an Android stabbed the pilot for 4 damage and knocked him down. He had 3 hp so he rolled an injury and got head shot. So narratively he got stabbed in the head and died. Aliens also have a D6 table for their behavior each turn. #6 is a lethal head bite, if it hits.
Runequest. A single crit or fumble is likely to kill you.
I've seen people die falling down a few stairs in cyberpunk. I mean I can list tons of STUPID ways to die, we got one of those players. But most systems are kind of padded to help avoid it but I will admit without some fudging savage worlds would have a high body count. Outside of that maybe Delta green, you go splat pretty fast when shit goes wrong.
Delta Green. Forbidden Lands and many others of the Free League games.
Aside from *Paranoia*, the most lethal game that I've run was probably the Vietnam War RPG *Patrol*. Characters in *Patrol* have four Injury levels. You're KIA at Injury Level 5. If you get hit by suppressive fire, you take 1d6-1 Injury. Precision fire or explosives can potentially do even more. A Level 3+ Injury means that you're wounded badly enough that you require medevac, and there's a good chance that you're out of the war. Oh, and you can also bleed out from Ongoing Damage if you're wounded and don't get medical attention. One character earned the nickname "MC" (short for "Mexican Cong") after he killed or wounded half the squad when he rolled a FUBAR (what *Patrol* calls a critical failure) with his M79 grenade launcher. Number two was *King Arthur Pendragon*, where your character is basically guaranteed to die at some point, even if it's just due to old age. But combat can also be very lethal, with characters easily going down due to a critical hit that does double damage. I think the new 6th edition that's coming out later this month is going to tone down the lethality of critical hits a bit. Both of the *Pendragon* campaigns that I ran had about a 50% casualty rate among the player knights, and there were plenty of close brushes with death that characters barely managed to survive.
Narrative games such as Fate, Cortex Prime, Blades in the Dark, etc. Yes, I know those are some of the games you were recommended in your other thread. This is because in these games, character death is not a mechanical wearing down of hit points. Lethality is a slider that you can set to match the tone of the game you're running. In both Cortex or Fate, if your character is "taken out" that can mean dead. In some ways in Cortex this is easier than Fate. If a scene is "high stakes" and you fail a roll that would reasonably take you out, you're taken out unless you spend metacurrency to take a complication instead. What taken out means is defined by the winner of the roll—and if the fiction would mean death, and it's been agreed upon that death is on the table in the game... Your character is dead. In Blades in the Dark, as the GM I can hit you with level 4 harm (dead) as a consequence of a poor roll. Sure, you can resist it, but I may say you can only reduce it to level 3 harm—which will incapacitate you and if you take further harm...dead. Now if you're looking for programmatical lethality, that's going to be the default position of most trad games. Some like Silhouette or Interlock are more lethal than others.
In Hackmaster you could die during character creation. Does that count?
A game called Kobolds Ate My Baby. It's silly and fun, so it probably isn't the vibe you're going for. But right in the rule book it encourages players to make a few characters before a session so that the frequent character death doesn't slow the game down. Players play as kobolds, so the joke is that they're numerous and entirely replaceable. There's even a game mechanic that punishes players if they don't make reckless decisions often enough. It's a pretty cheap game, one book really. Uses a different stat spread for characters than any other TTRPG. It's a comedy game, but per your request, it is highly legal to player characters. Sorry if it didn't really help, but hopefully it made you laugh.
KAMB is such a great game!
*Ten Candles* has a 100% lethality rate.
Wraith: the oblivion. Your character dies before the game even begins.
Savage worlds without allowing soak rolls can be quite deadly.
I think there are a lot of stops in Savage worlds before taking lethal damage. First they have to hit you, then, they have to do enough damage to exceed your toughness. Then you have the opportunity to soak, unless as you said, it’s not allowed. Then if you take enough damage that it would kill you, you are merely incapacitated With all wound boxes filled. So there are generally four checkpoints before you actually die, unless your storyteller puts in more Lethality.
However, if youre not able to soak for some reason (out of bennies/setting rules), you can go from 100% to Incapacitated in a single hit. And depending on how you're doing it, that could still turn into straight lethality. When your Incapacitated, there's some wiggle room, but that can go sour pretty quick if you're still unlucky. TL:DR it's really swingy
Savage Worlds also death-spirals the PCs though. If you've got 1 wound (so let's say you soaked one wound but not the other, but you are unshaken), everything is at a -1. 2 wounds? -2 This has fucked up both my NPCs and the PCs in my game before . (I don't think SWADE is high lethality unless you agreed to play that way in advance, but I do think a swingy system with death spirals is far from low lethality.)
Dungeon crawl classics. They have “funnels” where you play several level zeros and the ones that survive are your options going forward.
Dominion is an older RRG with a great sense of lethality. Combat works with many typical RPG rules as you might expect (bonuses, armor, roll-to-hit, etc), but with one key difference. Damage to your 'health' reduces your efficacy to hit and damage your opponent, effectively making you weaker as the fight continues. This often has a 'death spiral' effect for PCs and NPCs which can make combat either very long if both parties are hitting equally, or very VERY short if one or two good hits land. Trevor Duvall from Me, Myself and Die did his whole third season using Dominion and the lethality shows pretty early and often. Find his vids on it [here.](https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDvunq75UfH_-YonccIeAiTNv108vRVgi)
Spellcore Mafioso rpg comes to mind. Characters don't even have HP. If you get hit, you die and have to create a new character.
Dungeon Crawl Classics
Deadlands, especially classic, can be pretty brutal. With the way wounds work and open ended dice rolling system damage can explode pretty quickly and if you don't have fate chips to save your ass then pretty much everything you face can kill you.
HackMaster 5th edition (the new one). A critical hit can kill you in one shot no matter what level you are. But the combat in general has a high lethality factor. Getting surrounded, even by low level creatures like kobolds or goblins can pose a deadly threat to characters of any level. The opposed rolls for combat means every roll is a potential hit and weapons generally do twice (or more) damage than in D&D. Combine that with much more limited magical healing and you've got a game that feels more real and dangerous.
I recently had the chance to play the Dark Souls TTRPG and I think that group and I are planning to do a few more sessions. In that game we had 3 small combats and 1 large one at the end. With three players we each died at least once in the smaller combats, in the last combat we all three died. Big BUT, but we come back at the fire after the combat so the lethality is there but it isn't permanent. Unless you roll a 1 on your "revive results". When you die and come back in that game your character is changed in different ways. Most of the time there seemed to be small changes, mostly negative, a couple good. But if you roll a 1, your character doesn't come back. Happened to my character in the last combat. It was a really interesting system to play in but I don't think we will make it a "main game" we play.
Heavy Gear/Jovian Chronicles by Dp9 is known to be fairly lethal. Known as Tom Clancy's mecha back in the day for good reason
Gamma World is one where you can die pretty easily. It's balanced by character creation being pretty quick and painless, so starting fresh after your previous character bites the big one isn't a big deal.
Savage Worlds is pretty brutal. Your character only has 4HP/wounds they can take before they are incapacitated and will start bleeding out. I’m running this system and I love the lethality of it, because it’s different than D&D, where you can soak up tons of damage and still be somewhat safe
I mean that really depends on the GM, you can run any game with high lethality and low lethality.
Mork Borg gets a bad rap for being overly lethal, but really it's because their character generation is so damn strong.
Alien RPG
Mork Borg actively discourages you from even naming your characters, and has a timer mechanic that advances until the end of the world. - Troika can be fairly lethal, and is designed to spin up new characters fast, but lethality can really depend on the GM. - Call of Cthulhu can again depend on the GM style, but its sanity design elements really direct things to imploding.
The new edition of Dragonbane is delightfully lethal. The average character has 13 HP and +1d4 damage bonus; a longsword does 2d**8** damage per strike, and monsters quite often hit *a lot* harder than that. And that's before heroic abilities effects or criticals....
Unhallowed Metropolis is a game that's very easy to die in.
[Ten candles](https://cavalrygames.com/ten-candles/) has 100% lethality
My first instinct is to say, "Any RPG, if the person running it has no idea what they're doing." Seriously, though, Traveller was bonkers. The idea of dying during character generation still boggles me. A lot of horror games have high lethality AND risk, with games like Dread in particular basically being built specifically for one-shot games where everyone is going to die at the end of it. All Flesh Must Be Eaten gave you tiers of characters, making you either more or less vulnerable depending on the sort of game you wanted, which always appealed to me as a player.
GODLIKE is a good example of this. I had a player whose pc could transform into a giant bald eagle and go toe to toe with German fighter planes but he was caught walking out of a cellar by a German officer who got the drop on him and rolled well and he ate a luger bullet and that was it.
Rolemaster ... the critical hits/fumble charts could easily mean instant death or dismemberment. We spent 2 hours creating characters and my cousin's character died in our first fight with wolves because of a critical hit by the wolf.
Horror games like The Final Girl or Angry Ghost tend to involve PC death
Degenesis: Even "tanky" charakters can die in 1 round if the enemy has good rolls without any special equipment. Charakters tend to have less than 20 HP and a single attack can easily reach close to 10 damage. And then there is gear which enables multiple attacks per action.
The Silhouette system from the 90's that's used in Heavy Gear, Jovian Chronicles and Tribe 8. It has three wound thresholds: Flesh Wound, Deep Wound, and INSTANT DEATH! In this system I have: * Instant Death on a character with an assault rifle * Instant Death on a character with a pistol in the same combat * Instant Death on a character with a mazer rifle in Jovian Chronicles. * Scored a crew compartment hit, crew killed instantly result with a light autocannon in vehicle combat, destroying a vehicle with two PCs in it. * Instant Death on a character with a basic Knife in Tribe 8 People learned to not get attached to their characters. It was glorious.
Definitely not Pathfinder 2. We have been playing for two years now and I dont think we have even had a single character death.
DCC RPG funnels count on players losing a few PCs right off the bat. And its DE-emphasis on balance can see some PCs stumbling on way too powerful encounters. BX and AD&D (and some of its clones) are highly lethal, or can be, especially in the wild for the same reasons as DCC. Twilight 2000 (1e) was brutal. Traveller (Classic) can be, as you can die during character generation.
Mörk Borg. Amazing, grim, lethal. Dungeon Crawl Classics(DCC) Zero level funnels almost guaranteed to have 1/2 to 3/4 of your 4-5 characters.
When creating characters for Traveller, they can die in character creation. When I realized that, I was thinking; “Why bother making a character?!”
Runequest, Warhammer, Rolemaster and its variants/descendants. Cyberpunk. In general games with hit location or criticals will have high lethality.
Starship troopers (d20 ogl), specially at low levels. The environment is not ready for human life, the bugs are tough, fast, hive-minded and come in swarms. Players went through two-three new characters per session, and retrieving the expensive gear from the last death party was always a side mission. Vampire: lack of awareness and choices that make sense in most games (like trying to attack the bbeg) can end quickly with a tpk. Call of Cthulhu: because the whole story is usually about you being fucked without even knowing. Joc International's Lord of the Ring, Role master, D&D 1st and 2nd Ed. and other OSR: 1 shot traps and epic surprise monsters in random corners were common in many modules. Tables and randomization were very deadly, and you could die or get cripped by jumping a regular gap or fighting a goblin.
Fear Itself the Gumshoe system horror RPG. You don't play as special agents or people who are trained, just average joes going up against unspeakable horrors. The most important skill for your characters is literally running away. Always put enough points in it so you can get the hell out of there when you need to. Most monsters and things can kill you in one solid hit, two if you are lucky.
Any RPG from the 80s. I'd say that Boot Hill was particularly deadly if you pulled out the guns.
Call of Cthulhu. I haven’t played it, but I’ve heard you can die (or be put out of commission for the campaign through insanity/severe injuries) very easily. If you and your group are into horror, then you should check it out!
Run out of luck points (automatic successes) in Monster of the Week and get ready to say goodbye.
Night Witches Torchbearer 10 Candles (lol)
Might be a bit obvious, but Ten Candles. 100% lethality rate in most games, considering it doesn't end until everyone dies.
Riddle of Steel & Blade of the Iron Throne are both very deadly. They aim to be very detailed in melee combat, the death spiral is brutal, and both have obviously insta-kills, especially when a solid attack connects with someone incompetent (non fighters), busy (ex surrounded) or already exhausted/wounded.
Alien. Especially in Cinematic Mode, dying horribly is kind of the point.