How great should the risk of dying be?

[kyoryu]

I would say a game where one character died a year and a half ago, is not a game where I would consider the stakes life or death. I've run games where a PC died literally every session, and people still enjoyed themselves. It's just a question of playstyle goals and stakes. I've also run games that players did not die in at all. It's a different kind of game.

There's an interesting aside here that the stakes of character death are generally based on investment - the longer you play the character, the more investment there is. If you're running "everyone dies, all the time", then you might have a stronger use case for "character creation as death penalty", though I'm still not a fan. If you're having characters die that you've played for months... I think that investment would be much higher than the "make a character penalty".

But, yeah, totally agree on "one character died a year and a half ago" as being not a particularly lethal campaign. It's more like the style where people like to feel they're in a hardcore campaign, but really aren't. Which is a thing.