One of the reasons why our characters did not die more than they did in our RQ game was because of hit locations. There was a good chance that you would be taken out by a limb being "functionally incapacitated" and be out of the fight. As long as your group won the combat in the end you would be healed up while the others would be captured or "put to the sword".
Another was admittedly a house rule where you made progressively tougher Con rolls when you were at 0 general HPs or less till you hit -10. At that point the Con roll was Conx0, which you of course failed automatically.
Failing either of those, or getting your head severed or something like that, there was always the Resurrection spell to fall back on. Although we had a couple Humakti who managed to make it to retirement without ever dying. Actually I think they might have been a little disappointed about that.
