Whereas tugging assertive content out of most of my team is like luring the magic worms out that live in coral. They largely follow and react. When I get a barnstorm player I try to keep them and build around them–even if I kinda wanna kill em half the time, as they can’t always take a hint. Assertive folks are rarely also restrained. One of my all-time favourite players was also a complete bull, fought me all the time. He started calling me ‘5 of 9’ because I, as the Supreme Court of our game, was going to make the final ruling, however arbitrary or politicised. Constant headache, but dude was a genius. His play never required managing, mind you, and meta-assholery I can handle way easier than in-game.
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At least in GURPS, which is what I primarily run, it’s hard to kill a character with a single roll. Ordinarily you first have to do enough damage to make them unconscious; then if they remain conscious, you have to do enough damage to kill them; then they actually have to fail the HT roll; and if they fail by only 1 or 2, they have a mortal wound and they might be saved by surgery.
In any case, I don’t see a lot of PC deaths, just because I’m willing to inflict them. I went years before the first one.
What I think happens if you’re willing to have PC deaths, and the players know it, is that they play differently. You’re much less likely to get what Justin calls “a slap-happy play session.” On one hand, players treat their characters as valued resources who should not be thrown away; they have them take steps to minimize risk, the same way actual people in dangerous occupations commonly do. On the other hand, when the situation is one where they think the goal is worth taking a risk for, it’s dramatic, because they’ve effectively declared that a particular goal is important enough to their character so they’re willing to endanger themselves for it. And then playing out the pursuit of that goal is intense, because they’ve got skin in the game.
Back when I ran the French swordplay campaign that later gave rise to GURPS Social Engineering, there was a scene where three player characters were on their way home after an evening at the theater. They spotted that they were being quietly encircled by some low-lifes. The male PC (this was a campaign with women fencing students) drew his rapier and ran full tilt at the most obvious foe, a big man with a two-handed cudgel—and missed. The big man made a wild swing as he ran past, hit him in the leg, and knocked him down, inflicting crippling injury. That left the two women to fight their way out, which they succeeded in doing.
The subsequent dice roll showed that the crippling was lasting, but could be repaired; so I let the PCs find a surgeon. But the results weren’t wholly successful! The player’s comment on all this was “Bad leg and Addicted to laudanum? Sweet!” Then he came up with the idea of his character gaining a variant on the Drunken Fighting perk as a result of his unsteady gait, which I though was clever enough to be allowed in this moderately cinematic campaign.