I totally agree with what you're saying. I'd only use DMPCs to fulfill specific roles in a party, and they'd never carry the story. In this case it seems I might need them for medical treatment since, at least my players, nobody ever wants to play the perceived less combat capable medic.
I also agree about fatal systems and getting players to approach combat more realistically. My fear here is mainly that all of the systems seem extremely fatal to PCs. RPGs being what they are, combat will play a large role in most games. I was, and I guess am, concerned that the T2000 variants rely on large numbers of friendly NPCs to mitigate this in combat encounters, players aren't having to re-roll characters every other game.
Most games this fatal that I have played, like the war hammer RPGs, implement a fate point system, or "magical" healing to keep characters alive and mitigate the "your wounded, you now have to spend 5 weeks recovering and out of action."
I guess TW2013 has survival points, but still on paper it seems pretty vicious. Particularly when 90% of the published encounters seem to have hostile NPCs outnumbering my PCs by at least 3 to 1.
But besides this, do you have a recommendation on which system I should use? Which system has the most streamlined combat?
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