Keeping you players alive for dummies

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by Boge

The thing is, death in Gurps has to be a real possibility or the players will play out of character, going up against challenges they don't have a chance of succeeding (because they do because the GM is protecting their characters from dying).

It's entirely possible to fail at what you're trying to accomplish without your character getting killed. That said, there are some players who will play their characters in an arguably-inappropriate manner if they know they have plot armor, which can potentially ruin immersion for everyone. If you have such a problematic player, one option is certainly to have death be on the table. Other options are to talk to the player outside of the game to see if they're willing to treat things seriously, to have the player design a character who actually should behave in the manner they do (someone who legitimately cannot die, has a Delusion to a similar effect, has a straight-up death wish that makes them take extremely risky actions, or similar), to boot them from the game, to run a campaign where going up against impossible odds and coming out the other side still alive is part of the point, or probably any number of other solutions I'm not thinking of.

That's assuming you don't want player character death to be a thing that can randomly happen. Many groups prefer for death to be a possible failure state, and for those the rules will work as-is.