In my game, we use the following guidelines:
Dead if you've gone your full HPs negative or a vital hit location has been reduced to the location's full HPs negative or below.
So, someone with 14Hp dies when he reaches -14HP. Someone with 6 HP in the head, chest or abdomen dies when he reaches -6 in those locations.
Anyone reduced to 0 HP or below is unconcious and loses 1 HP per round until they die, if they have a bleeding wound.
Any healable wound can be healed after death for resurrection purposes. People can be resurrected as long as they are above the death threshold, even if they would be still injured afterwards, but it's best to heal people fully, just in case.
I like the (CON - Negative HPs)x5% chance of surviving each round and I might introduce that.
We played with strict 0HP=death, -6 vital location=death in RQ2 and had a massively fatal game. Since we were all Rune Lords and had access to Chalana Arroy Priestesses, we could always get out of it, but that seems too excessive for me these days. We had one scenario where around 8 PCs died in the random encounters before the scenario had properly started, and these weren't wimpy Rune Lord Priests by any means, they were tough!
So, since then, I've tried to tone down the deathcount.
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