F.A.T.A.L. Not only will your character die if you actually play the game...you as a player stand a good chance of being lynched if you suggest playing it.

Seconded. I suggested F.A.T.A.L. to a couple of players, and they . . . well . . . didn't lynch me.

Real Life

2012th Edition

I'll get back to you on that after Real Life(tm) 2015 edition: Revenge of He Who Exists.

Traveller. You can die before you've finished rolling up your character.

It can take an hour just to work out the full effects of one wound, which can frequently lead to retirement-worthy injuries. It does not forgive you for getting hit or picking fights you shouldn't have.

The second part I can grok, the first sentence though is enough to make me stay clear away of the game. I can deal with characters getting killed off, but I've no interest in spending an hour on the post mortem. At least with Dr. Who, it's fast and simple. You get shot by a Dalek gun, you're dead.

Dread.

Unless you are amazing at Jenga.

Dread.

Unless you are amazing at Jenga.

We were playing on a card table one time, and I had brought my dog over. As we're talking about characters, the GM says to me, "If your dog bumps the table, it counts for your character."

5 minutes into the game, my dog leans against a table leg and vigorously scratches an ear with a hind leg.

I'm familiar with Pathfinder(D20), Alternity, Rifts, Silhouette, and Battletech: Time of War. From my experience, Silhouette is brutal to inexperienced players that haven't learned how to exploit defense modifiers like hard cover. I think it's actually more lethal then Battletech and Rifts. Damage multiplier systems are nasty.

With GURPS, it's something like -5x HT before you die

True, but just 5 or so damage to a limb will cripple it...which will cause a lot of difficulty for most characters without magical healing. And, tt's pretty easy to get to dead with weapons that deal 7d6 (modern assault rifles) with high RoF (rates of fire). -5x HP is just where you die for sure...you can die before that if you botch the HT roll.

GURPS run with the realism switches turned on is quite deadly. The nice thing about it is that you can fine-tune it to get just the level of lethality you want from your campaign.

My future GURPS Twilight 2000 campaign will use all of the realism switches. I expect a bloodbath if the PCs go in there trying to act all invincible, but they'll do okay if they use the same caution a person would in the real world when facing hordes of enemy troops, radiation dangers, limited rations, etc.
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GURPS runs into scaling problems with weapons and defenses at higher tech levels.

Every TL increase alternated increasing damage dice and DR by 5 and 2. Except they were staggered.

So at one TL, you might have your damage go up by a factor of 5, and armor would go up by a factor of 2 - and you might as well wear feathered boas for all that your armor will do for you...and the next tech level, the armor goes up by a factor of 5 while the guns go up by a factor of 2 - and now the gun needs to roll max damage to harm you. At all.

GURPS also ran into this mechanical artifact:

Multiply dice of damage by 3.5. Subtract typical DR. If result is negative, combat is largely futile. If positive by more than 10-12, the extra dice are insurance not actual damage.