Statement: Dying in games is fun.
All hp and health and resources and whatnot is just a song and dance around the fact that you don’t want to be responsible for killing your friends. Coward. As we have previously established elsewhere, death is an illusion, the character is an emanation of the player and so on down the line. Death is just a shift, and consciousness can continue if you want it to. It’s unavoidable really—what the player knows can’t be entirely blocked out from the character.
Flip. A. Coin. That’s stressful isn’t it, captures the danger right nice and proper, but there needs to be more. A sacrifice without a robe or fancy knife or something is just a murder.
We could make a board with spaces, branching paths. A tree if you like. You ascend it by approaching death, but you can choose how you go. Do you become unconscious and take a longer route, or do you stay fine but invisibly near death, or maybe compromise and get wounded diminishing your agency for a while.
Ignore fights entirely. There was a fight, flip a coin until you get heads, move on for every failure. Maybe you died.
There is no more story in gilding it, death comes along however it likes and it is all the same.