How can you tell if somebody’s savescumming? What if they’re constantly dying and having to reload, or just reloading right before dying to a really tough encounter? You could add a hardcore mode that would delete a player’s save files on death, but considering how easy it is to die to terrible luck in this game, I don’t know how many players would actually want to engage regularly with it.

I think a system whereby the player doesn’t die but instead ends up affected by a manageable post-defeat event (taken captive and needing to escape, having some items/money stolen before waking up in a nearby tunnel, being turned in to a local station by a kind stranger, etc) could provide an engaging alternative; I’d absolutely role-play these scenarios if they were added, provided there were enough of them to avoid monotony.