And yes, adventures instantly and automatically become utter fail the moment you try and force fates worse than death as a railroading measure.
You've thrown around the term "fate worse than death" before.
I don't agree.
For me, a fate worse than the death of my character is the following:
Step 1: Characters and monsters roll initiative. Characters win, due to OMGWTFBBQ hax of the init boosting and celerity sorts.
Step 2: The next caster up kills the monster with the highest initiative with a save or die. Split up loot.
Step 3: Wash, rinse, and repeat via divination + teleport.
Which is the game style you seem to be advocating. I'm far more interested in a game where interesting things happen. I am profoundly
bored by rocket tag. As a player, I avoid characters who use it. As a DM, I avoid monster who use it. The only thing that is more tedious than rocket tag is rocket tag where your chance of losing is infinitesimal. At that point there's no reason to bother with statting characters up. Have a d100. Whenever there's a combat, roll it. You get a 1, you're dead. Anything else, you win. You're just playing a really overcomplicated game of magical tea party, since 90% of your character sheet never matter.
Headbutting a guard with your smite evil, stealing his keys and rescuing the imprisoned fellow party members is an interesting occurrence. Grappling the guy who killed your clan into the ocean, knowing full well your adamantine armor will sink both of you into a watery grave is an interesting occurrence. Both of those are things that you claim are somehow worse than playing a build where you always go first and nobody can save against your mass flesh to salt DCs.