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Death in 3.5 is rough, especially for high level characters where the killing blow could reduce a character to -20 in one strike.
I propose a new rule on death:
To die, a character must fail a Fortitude saving throw where the DC is equal to the negative hit points the character currently has.
This has the following beneficial gaming impacts:
1) Death itself becomes an opportunity for luck to take a hand.
2) A character's fortitude save (and by extension Constitution score) becomes terrifically relevant to survivability, favoring those characters who are traditionally considered hard to kill: dwarves, warriors, etc.
3) As a character increases in level, his ability to avoid death heroically also increases.
I have playtested this rule for 4 years and found it to be a much-appreciated and enjoyed house rule. (Initially I tried the standard DC mod of 10+, but found that it made death more common than desired and have adjusted it to this formulation with very good effects.)
It has not proven unbalancing at all.
