Yup. People make jokes about 'Derek the Fighter' being 'rolled up' to replace Alex, Bob, and Charlie the Fighter where someone just erased and re-wrote the name and said 'it's my last character's brother/sister/child', but that was part and parcel - it was almost expected that if your character died, your replacement would have some connection to the previous one...relative, friend, hireling, something. Bad luck could kill almost any character at any time, even the toughest fighters, because 'tough' was an extremely relative term. In the earliest versions of the game, you earned XP for collecting treasure, not killing monsters; treasure was usually guarded by monsters, so killing them was one way to do it, but it didn't matter how you got said treasure in the end, and combined with the high lethality rate of combat, it encouraged finding other ways to win or bypass fights.