As it has been said before, the risk of loosing the character must be a clear and present danger. As a general assumption, if the player feels the risk for his/her character, he/she will act consequently. The player will take precautions, or not, at his/her own choice. But in a somewhat unspoken agreement, if the general background depicted by the GM is a dangerous or suspicious one, the player assumes the risk and the consequences of any future actions and plans in that background. Doing this, in my opinion, the impact of an eventually dead is softened.
Of course all those absurd and arbitrary deaths which are so abundant in any conflict must be avoided. A paratrooper drowned in a well after a Catastrophic Failure in the Parachute check and before the beginning of the mission could be very realistic. But it’s a role reserved for a NPC.
While running a game as a GM, I don’t fix the dice rolls that put I danger character lives for the simple reason that I would be very disappointed, as a player, if I noticed that all my heroic deeds and all those escapes from a certain dead are a trick of the GM.
The players must rely on the fact that the GM is acting consequently to the rules and to the roles of the NPCs. In that way, when the character manages survive another difficult situation the player could feel satisfied and sure about his/her merits. And any death in the group (thought sorry by both the players and the GM) only contribute to increase the sense of the epic among the survivors.
BTW.Tomorrow I have a T2K roleplaying session, as a GM, with the group that is recovering the bargues of Torun in "The Wild Bunch" way.
http://forum.juhlin.com/showthread.php?t=873
The players knew the risks of their and voluntary assumed them. Most probably tomorrow some of their characters will die. But, who am I to steal them a moment of glory?
