Steal This Rule: "Death is primarily a narrative conceit"
Imagine this: you have spent some time kicking off your solo campaign. A few sessions in, you have backstory and lore. You have an entire chart of threads and characters. You have a hexcrawl with a dozen notes. And then, your second level wizard springs a trap and you roll on a table and get poison. The effects say, "Make a saving throw or die." And you roll a critical fail. What happens next? It is a fascinating aspect of the tabletop sphere that out of all the many genre hobbies - comic books, movies, novels, videogames, etc - that really only tabletop games, including role-playing games, consider the death of characters (or, in the case of many board/card games: depletion of a life point type pool of the player) to be a primary driver of narrative tempo. In books and movies, death is side story reserved for plot twists and big reveals and mostly impacting side characters and NPC types. In videogames, while you have a dedicated fanbase of hardcore runs, you still have res...