The way I normally run games is hyper lethal. The group I’m running right now would not like that. Temperamentally, they’d be pretty upset if their characters died.
Running a game is of course a balance between GM and PCs, so I won’t remove all threat of death. That would make things very boring for me. But I will put my finger on the scales in their favor, to whit giving every player +5 HP at char gen for free.
The way GURPS works is that there’s four stats, and ST is the base for hit points. Stats are on a fixed scale centered at 10. With the free bonus, every player had a 15 HP at char gen instead of 10, effectively increasing their hit points by 50%. Sounds good, right?
It’s better, actually, because GURPS has a lot of rolls to stay alive. Their rolls are against HT, which sounds odd but works surprisingly well in practice. As the players get higher HT, they can go further and further negative and stay alive.
Six months ago, the first player crossed the HT 20 barrier. I hard-cap rolls at 18 before modifiers, and this player had a -3 to rolls to stay alive, so at best they were rolling against a 15 HT target. However they did some admirable role playing and bought off the -3, resulting in a base target number of 18 to stay alive. By now, all players have at least a 16 HT. And the game’s 4 years old. The lowest ST is 16, for 21 HP, and the highest is 19, for 24 HP. These players just do not die. They can go -120 HP making HT rolls to stay in the fight, and they’ve got healing powers if they can rest and make some first aid rolls.
But they’re constantly at the edge of death. Every moment of every fight, they’re rolling to stay alive. It’s awesome.
Coincidentally, I run a number of house rules. The biggest is that a player may spend an xp to reroll anything, 3xp if they’re rerolling a crit failure. That means every time a player has to reroll an HT roll to stay alive, they’re burning xp. It hurts. In a bad fight, where the dice just roll against them, the players can easily loose a skill level’s worth of xp staying alive. Note: only their own rolls, mind. They can’t spend an xp to make an enemy reroll staying alive.
Players will almost never retreat to avoid a big bad. But retreat to keep their points? Oh, things get tense.