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Originally Posted by whswhs
I haven't had a player character death in years and years. This is kind of ironic, because I don't believe in fudging dice rolls to keep a PC alive, which seems to appall a lot of other gamers. (This is where I start making comparisons to poker—in this case, to playing for small change rather than for chips. I like there to be something real at stake.)
One part of this is that I often run low-combat games. As the most extreme case, my first GURPS campaign, using GURPS Uplift, had only two combat scenes in two years: one space battle and one situation where a PC went into convulsions and had to be restrained and treated.
I can tell you, speaking as a player, that it's possible to be in suspense without combat or physical danger. Some years back, I was in a friend's Changeling: The Dreaming campaign, playing an unseelie coyote pooka. At least twice during the campaign, he had to venture into an underground realm of twisted unseelie ruled by an ogre named Black Annis. There was never any question of fighting; Black Annis's forces were just too powerful. Instead, the suspense was over whether my character's cover story would be penetrated or not. I was on the edge of my seat every minute of those scenes. (Which is part of why that particular GM is my favorite of the local GMs I've played with.)
But if a character did get killed, I would just let the player have their choice: sit out the rest of the session and watch, or leave and come back for the next session with a new character. I would expect them to do the first, though. Given my style of running games, players often sit and watch while other people's characters are on camera and theirs aren't—and mostly seem to find it entertaining.
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Ever consider something called a character tree? The player has two characters, one of which he plays, the other is kept ready to play in the event that the first character is killed. Character trees might be a good idea in a World War II setting, especially if your character is storming the beaches of Normandy. The secondary character simply wanders onto the scene after the primary is killed, the secondary having been cut off from his unit. Perhaps in World War II, the player ought to have two secondary characters as they are liable to be cut down quite often. Always good to be prepared.