[Icelander]

The risks for RPG characters are just so astronomically higher than for real people that they really need metagame traits to compensate. For example, many people consider it heroic to volunteer as a soldier in a war. But the real risk of being deployed to Afghanistan or Iraq is so low that it wouldn't be worth rolling for in a game.

0.29% of personnel deployed there for at least one tour in the last 15 years have died. Many of these served multiple tours, so the risks for one tour would be substantially lower.

Of course, these figures include all military personnel deployed to combat zones, which will include many that are not front-line combatants. Even so, no analysis I've seen puts the risk of death for any modern MOS at above 2% in a single deployment. That's 'Bad Stuff will happen on critical failure' territory, not typical RPG session risk territory.

In other words, the chances of survival over three to nine months are 98% to 99.7%. That means that if it was gamed out, realistically, only on a critical failure on a monthly Job Roll would there exist a chance of death. But don't misunderstand me. This is a huge risk, in real world terms. Real people don't like to accept risks that characters in games regard as their daily existence.

Most RPGs don't feature odds of death and injury this low, because most RPGs feature violence and risk at many times the rate any real person is likely to encounter it, usually within the first session.

If a PC is rolling at all, it's because there is a meaningful chance of failure on the roll. And that means a 2% or more chance of terrible consequences, in many cases, such as Active Defence rolls.* But because PCs will make many more such rolls over their careers than any real person, they'll need Luck to make sure that their frequent failures are, at least, not immediately deadly.

*Which, for that matter, are often lower than this.