Ok, so I am solo playing, in part for my own enjoyment, and in part to get more familiar with how OSR feels for eventually gming a game at my local library.

I am using scarlet heros, which has a pretty good additional rules for solo play specifically, like how it uses a damage reduction method to make playing a solo entity more viable, but I am using a small party and that particular element feels rather overdone for more then 2 pc's. So I was thinking about stripping that out, but retaining the defy death mechanic as a pseudo replacement. where you can taking increasing scale of damage instead of a particular consequence. So you are likely to survive at least 1 blow. But each subsequent save becomes more costly.