Death in lethal games .. is not that scary

"I can just roll up a new character in 10 min, who cares if I die"

Background:

I have recently been playing some OSR games (mostly Shadowdark) trying to get into them and seeing what the hype is about. Roll up a character, go adventure, loot, level, inevitably you will encounter some bullshit or misread a room and take on a challenge you shouldn't have, character dead, repeat. After going through that process a couple of times I noticed that it doesn't really bother me that much when a character dies on me.

The Promise vs the Reality:

One of the main points that sold me on trying out OSR was that lethality makes players think more and care more about the game. "If there is no risk of death there is no point in playing smart". I does make sense right? Play smart and avoid dying. For that monsters need to be able to consistently threaten PCs. And because of that consistency in the threat level the smartest thing to do is to try avoid fighting at all cost. Sneak, bribe, loot, level, and ingnore the DM trying to bait you with a big reward. Is this fun? Certainly, but not all the time. Sometimes you just want to take a risk and get enough to level up and progress with the game.

So when it happens, and PCs die, you want the process to be as fast as possible. It's not going to be a rare moment. Roll up a new PC, get into the remaining group fast, and continue playing. Shadowdark even mentions that a new character can appear out of nowhere and its best practise to just role with it in order to keep the game going. Similarly it seems that its conventional to assume that the new character is getting filled in and has all the neccesary information. This de-emphasises the seperation between player and character. What surprised me is that there rarely was fighting over the items of dead characters, the player whose character died had (usually) the right to claim the items with their new character.

Death in these games is very .. convenient. Especially because items are often more valuable then levels. I certainly would trade a level for a good set of armour, could even forgo two levels if its magical. But as long as you manage to recover the items, death is just an inconvenience, a temporary setback. And the obvious thing of making it more punishing would mean streching out your campeign by having to redo some ground work that was already done. It's a pasing and hype killer. So in the end, because of the focus on lethality, the stakes around death are not very high. 

And that's completly fine. It just means I'm more tempted to roleplay my Int 5 characters rather then break character and do the smart move that saves the group, because I know death isn't that impactful and if I die I can just roll up a new character in 10 minutes.

The Contrast:

I would very much like to end on that sentence because it loops back to the very first thing I wrote, but I think I should also write how death impacts me in other systems. Let's take DnD5e or Pathfinder2e, I'm fucking terrified of dying in those games. I don't want to theorycraft a new build. I don't want to learn a new very complex character. I don't want to come up with a new backstory that has hooks beats and connections to the world. I don't want to invent and learn to act a new personality. I want to complete the character I designed and finish their story and not watch the work and potential I put time into it go to waste. 

With the worst moment being dying at the beginning to the middle of a session and your table expecting you to come up with a new character on the spot. Come on, I need at least one hour to make a character I actually want to play in the foreseeable future and not just a stand-in for a potential character.

A stupid death in an OSR game is at worst mildly annoying. A stupid death in DnD will ruin my week.