Ah avoiding death.
RM is brutal in it's rules for death. If you ever tried to save a character and did stat losses for death you would see you end up with a vegetable for a character.
We have 4 rules to help keep characters with reasonable expectations for avoiding death.
1. Fate points. The fate point rules were a fantastic addition to RMSS. They made it so you could use Fate Points to reroll a fatal crit against you. Which can save your life. Though it is brutal if your just having a bad night rolling
. Earning Fate Points is also a great idea. As it can keep things going for all characters. We started with 3 FP's for dedicated Channeler's. 2 for casually religious characters(I.E. believed in a god, but didn't worship actively). And 1 FP for those who just would make a desperate prayer. Some players made bad choices and even 3 Fate Points sometimes couldn't save them from the crit monster. We always earned 1 FP per level and it seemed balanced.
2. Have towns/cities with high level clerics. A wise GM's has such cities/towns centrally located so players could always reach them in an emergency. This is very important for several reasons. 1. If I remember correctly the only class that has a resurrection spell is a cleric. Any non cleric has to buy a cleric's spell list and that is expensive. Also it is channeling so if your healer is not religious and doesn't worship a god. He probably won't be able to have such a spell channeled to him. IMO some of the best healers are strangely not channelers. The Mentalist healer can cast spells silently, has cheap enough heavy armor/weapons dev and can't be restricted by heavy handed/anti channeling cleric rules. The Healer class with the right talents is incredible. NPC clerics are great as they are high enough level to cast the spell. The group probably can't afford a resurrection, but they can always owe the NPC favor's and the GM can use this to further story. Also healing is WAY to expensive in RM IMHO. As a healer you have to develop 5 list just to heal forget any other spells. And 1 rough fight can bleed all the PP's your cleric has. So even if you have a cleric he probably won't be high enough level to cast resurrection. Or may be depleted of PP's and have to wait to cast the spell. The way RM healing is, I think Healers need 5x the PP development
. A side benefit of such cities is every once in a while a GM can have a high level cleric just happen by and save someone. And it is believable as there are reasons such clerics may be in the area.
3. Herbs. If you have a kind/reasonable Gm this can be great. If they have an economy that allows herbs to be plentiful enough and your GM let's you earn enough money you can buy them. My GM kept money tight so we could never afford them. Foraging for herbs always seemed tough in RM. As it took a day and it was pretty hard to get the group to wait a day for your 1 guy who had good enough foraging to try to make a successful roll. And it always ended up costing us too much. As they never foraged enough herbs to feed the group as they waited. Worse still is if the forager goes solo and gets attacked by a level 5 bear (classic Maul/Maul/bite death story for our group) . And even if he was great at it, if the needed herbs weren't in the region you currently were in, it was impossible to find them. And if no one spends the points to develop use/prepare herbs skills the herbs are pointless. And not many can afford to develop them properly.
4. God Call. Obviously regular religious characters get a better percentage. But even a non religious character can make an open ended roll to save themselves or others. We had a classic campaign where My warrior died to a brutal crit. I made a god call and failed. The rogue in my group made 3 open ended rolls and saved my character. The GM was so impressed he brought my warrior back with white hair. The rogue had a white streak in his hair. And my warrior became a paladin. Easily the most memorable character I ever had.
5. I also believe there were rules for sacrifices (in the book that had FP's) where you could sacrifice a magical item or make a pledge to a god and these sacrafices would add to the chance for a god call. The only magical items we got were if we bought them with our talents during player development. So that rule never helped us in our campaign, but it could help those whose GM's actually gave them magical items.
And if things go especially bad you can do like our kinder GM did. He always rolled for us to see. And he is a lucky roller. So sometimes the crits came hard and heavy. On one particularly bad night he sent sturges after us and they A crit the group to blindness (true story). After the whole group was depressed that we had to reroll all of our characters. The GM said you wake up and realize it was all a bad dream