@Catullus64: congratulations, you've reinvented retainers and henchmen. What you describe is a pretty common way to play old-school games. I'll explain how I've done it for longer campaigns afger a few comments.

Quote Originally Posted by Catullus64 View Post
If you're like me, you like running fairly high-lethality games, where it is very likely that PCs will die, especially if they don't use their wits. But high lethality can wreak havoc on more narratively-minded games which are driven by a strong central plot.
Plots that hinge on continued existence of individual characters are not strong. They are fragile. An actual strong central plot wraps around a theme that can be looked at from multiple angles and hence can continue even if every initial player character dies.

A simple example of a theme that can do this: war. It is easy to establish reason for war as something transcending the individual and individual lifespans, so that even if the current set of focus characters die, they have comrades-in-arms who would pick up the fight for them or even because of them. Victories and losses both can be worked into a narrative of the respective large-scale participants of that war.

Quote Originally Posted by Catullus64
When a PC dies under these circumstances, you often get the awkward phenomenon of having some johnny-come-lately show up to the party, suspiciously the same level, who is then expected to slot immediately into the existing story. It's often clunky, and harmful to verisimilitude. Hence, high lethality, in my opinion, tends to work better in a more sandbox format, or for very short campaigns.
That's a stereotype of how replacing characters works, yes. But it doesn't really have to be awkward or complicated. A lot of assumptions, unstated here, have to be in place before any awkwardness happens.

The first is that "the party" is a closed group, rather than open organization. Again, war serves as simple example of how easy this is to avert: a mercenary company or an infantry platoon of conscripts has people coming and going for reasons directly related to the activity. When people die, get injured or desert, new reinforcements have to be brought to the front or the group will be destroyed. The dungeon-dwelling paradigm of classic D&D can be used to similar end, with expeditions planned case-by-case. That way, there's a natural reason to change group composition both in response to character injury or loss as well as specific needs of a dungeon. In true open table play, each character could be played by a different character, but there isn't an actual problem with a player playing multiple characters and changing based on need.

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Anyways, how I do it in my games:

Lamentations of the Flame Princess (or other old-school D&D-type game): money allowing, player characters are allowed to hire retainers from level 1. These are level 0 NPCs generated by the game master and default to game master control. If a player character dies mid-session, a player has option to take over a retainer, at which point that retainer is promoted to level 1 of suitable class. After reaching level 2, they can also hire a henchman. A henchman starts as proper level 1 character and receives half share of treasure, advancing at half the rate of their master. A henchman must stay one level below their master or they'll leave to do things on their own. I, as the game master, usually generate a selection of characters to serve as henchmen. Henchmen default to game master control, but in practice I've had no problems giving them to player control - at most, it means a player has two turns in a round. If a player character dies mid-session, the player immediately resumes play as the henchman.

Praedor: each session begins in media res, at the border of Borvaria (the great big adventure area of the setting). If there are more characters than players ready at hand, the leftover characters are left to wait at the border camp as the others venture deeper. Upon death or return to the camp, a player has option to switch to or choose to continue as any of the leftover characters. This continues as long as there are excess characters at the camp. Characters can be created and played by anyone, though in practice so far, I as the game master have made them all.

So on and so forth. I'm in process of writing a third take of the system for a brand new campaign. It's a development on the Praedor model, fitted for classic dungeon crawling and fortress building. In that model, a certain area (namely the dungeon and its immediate surroundings) is the stage. Characters are followed when they are on that stage and cease to be followed when away. Some amount of retainers, henchmen etc. are expected to wait at the camp just outside and are available as reinforcements or replacements when earlier characters are injured, killed or leave for some other reason. Continuity of campaign is based on what happens in that area, rather than what happens to individual people.