Quote from: Dumarest;966509You can die very quickly in Boot Hill. Or by OSR do you mean only D&D and its descendants?

Honestly, I'm curious about games in general. Some groups enjoy highly lethal games, others don't, etc. I'm currently interested in games that have a slightly higher rate of character death than usual, but it's a flavor thing at this point, which I would like to support with a set of rules that works towards that.

I'm mostly asking for people's experiences with games in general because I haven't played as many games as some of the folks on this forum (especially D20 games), and I can't recall a game where my character died as a result of the rules so I wanted to throw it out there for folks to share. I did run a D&D 4e one-shot which ended in a near TPK (when the game first came out), and that might have been mostly due to the lack of experience on my end as well as on the end of the other players at that time.

In any case, thank you all for the responses; I found them very insightful!

Behind Enemy Lines is the most complicated game I know of where you are almost assured a TPK within a couple of sessions. It is sort of like Boot Hill with panzerfausts.

Low level D&D had high kill rates for us. Something about a character who only takes one or two sword strokes to kill.

Gamma World also had very high lethality. That has insta-death radiation and poisons, Black Ray Guns that kill anything they hit, and mutations like Death Field Generation that reduce everyone in range to one hit point.

Character generation was quick and easy, so we didn't mind going through them like popcorn.

RoleMaster unfortunately combined lengthy character generation with extremely lethal critical hits. I count it as old school since it started as a supplement for D&D etc.

Quote from: Nihilistic Mind;966521Honestly, I'm curious about games in general. Some groups enjoy highly lethal games, others don't, etc. I'm currently interested in games that have a slightly higher rate of character death than usual, but it's a flavor thing at this point, which I would like to support with a set of rules that works towards that.

In that case I'll mention Cyberpunk 2020 which has a very lethal combat system. If you're shot you're likely to die. CoC obviously is very lethal and I'd say Runequest has D&D beat by a country mile in terms of low level lethality.

Quote from: Nihilistic Mind;966521Honestly, I'm curious about games in general. Some groups enjoy highly lethal games, others don't, etc. I'm currently interested in games that have a slightly higher rate of character death than usual, but it's a flavor thing at this point, which I would like to support with a set of rules that works towards that.

Boot Hill is indeed a fairly lethal game, especially the 1st edition skirmish game. The later editions increase survivability a little as they moved to more RPG elements. But its still a pretty tough system once the lead starts flying.

Ive mentioned in a few threads about the original Albedo RPG's lethality.

Gamma World is another that can be particularly lethal. Especially if anyone has some of the better tech or mutations.

Star Frontiers is another fun one that gets overlooked for its lethality. Lasers. Lasers with sliders.

Lastly theres Shadowrun. How do I know this one can be lethal? Because my first time GMing I misunderstood an element of how 1st ed SR guns work and accidentally TPKed the runners. Cue rewinding things and fixing my mistake. As a player on the SR MUD I can also attest to the lethality of the system as I played a rescue service and occasional equipment retrieval escourt.

GURPS, unless you are making high-level supers or some such, is fairly lethal. Surprising for a game where character creation takes so long.

Hero System is exceedingly depending upon which levers you flip one way or the other.

Most versions of Traveller are moderate-to highly lethal unless the fight is asymmetric (there is battledress armor which makes you effectively a walking tank, but then you tend to draw anti-tank weapons). However, like most games where you start taking significant penalties early in your wound meter, what often happens is that you are shot once and really quickly start negotiating rather than continuing to shoot.

West End Games Star Wars I remember had a bit of a case of the expected damage from the stated out potential opponents (the monster manual, if you will) being insufficient to routinely harm a well optimized PC. Especially if you did something like put a wookie in armor, which might have been against the spirit of what they were going for, hard to tell.

Quote from: Voros;966606In that case I'll mention Cyberpunk 2020 which has a very lethal combat system. If you're shot you're likely to die.

This dates back to the "Friday Night Firefight" combat system from the original Cyberpunk which was based in large measure on FBI shoot statistics.  The head shots do doubled damage really cranked u the lethality...

Quote from: RunningLaser;966458Both games ended in TPK's- one against rats in a basement the other against a goblin raid.

Awesome. Nothing is as hardcore old school as the PCs being defeated and eaten by vermin.

Quote from: Larsdangly;966530Behind Enemy Lines is the most complicated game I know of where you are almost assured a TPK within a couple of sessions. It is sort of like Boot Hill with panzerfausts.

Was that from Task Force Games? I don't remember that game but the name seems familiar. Maybe I'm thinking of Delta Force.

Quote from: DavetheLost;966676This dates back to the "Friday Night Firefight" combat system from the original Cyberpunk which was based in large measure on FBI shoot statistics.  The head shots do doubled damage really cranked u the lethality...

Makes sense and yeah headshots were deadly. As they should be for a realistic-style .

Quote from: Voros;966762Makes sense and yeah headshots were deadly. As they should be for a realistic-style .

Well they should be, but they should also be hard to accomplish, which is not what I remember from the system.

In my old-school games, death is pretty common at low levels, and more rare at high-levels.  If a character gets to around level 4 (level 3 in DCC) it's a lot harder for them to die.
But since in most of my OSR games there's no resurrection, death is still possible at any level.

Quote from: Willie the Duck;966790Well they should be, but they should also be hard to accomplish, which is not what I remember from the system.

Yeah I remember that being an issue, as well as characters getting lots of hands blown off.