Every NPC plays in iron man mode. They do not even last an instance.
D. If you die in the game you die in real life.
I think there is a geniune argument for cmdr death in the game but only in some circumstances. The idea of a karma system (i.e. death/rebirth) a while back led me to think of a system with character death in the game. Basically reserved only for the most blatant forms cheating, like, combat logging and misused of blocking (things like that). If a cmdr was found out cheating, this would increase your karma score, which in turn would increase your chance of character death when destroyed. If over multiple incidents of cheating you reached a set threshold then instant death, your account gets reset, start again.
There is an actual game out there, I forget what it's called, that offers one life only. Once you die, that's it, you cannot play it again (it's account-based). I believe it's part of a study to see how people behave differently (as in, more cautiously) when there are no, as Thanos says, "resurrections".
As for One Life, a survival shooter where your Steam account would be locked out of the game after one death, things are looking grimmer. The developers haven’t updated the game’s Steam, Facebook or Twitter accounts since it got greenlit for Steam almost one year ago, on October 30, 2015. This despite fans asking what’s going on for months. The game’s website, meanwhile, no longer exists.