i kept a savestate in town and reloaded whenever my party wiped or got into an inescapable death spiral. did not use any inter-dungeon saves and tried to make an honest effort to drag dead party members back to town for revival (this still meant a couple of reloads when i got put into a financial hole by the temple of cant). My rationale was that the only real difference between characters besides class is my emotional investment, and going by the permadeath rules would just mean i’d make 6 more faceless character sheets with different names and have them spend a half hour fighting Murphy’s ghost anytime i got unlucky
Fwiw i still found it plenty tense and challenging with my more lenient experience, especially on long expeditions where my party got teleported or walked through the wrong one-way door and suddenly i was hopelessly lost. Youre also right that youre not missing anything amazing if you dont complete the game, i only beat Werdna because i was this close. The mapmaking is the keystone of OG Wizardry, you might as well treat it as a game that you can put down once you’ve satisfied the cartographer’s itch
edit: oh hey, made this post and then immediately got a google-recommended article for a fancy-ass digital eclipse remaster of wizardry 1 lol