dtgreene: Your description of the save system in Alliance Alive (which I own but still have not attempted to play) sould like the one in the PlayStation 2 remake of Romancing SaGa. I would say that this system is OK if the quicksave remains after you reload it, or if dungeons are short enough so that you can make your way to an inn reasonably often (provided the game doesn't overwrite your inn save when you're not at the inn, of course).
I guess. It was probably a bad example, anyway, just one I thought of. If you do play the game, I should mention that the movie fix works only most of the time, but when it doesn't, you can still get movies to play by replaying them (except the main menu, which you can probably live without or start/exit the game if you really need it). As to the save system, the inn/guild girl saves (multi-slot) are completely separate from the quick-save (single-slot), and in fact they are different kinds of saves. Only the quicksaves save the current monters. Thus saving at a guild girl, which is inside a dungeon, and immediately loading the game will effectively reset the dungeon.
Also, there's the fact that often, games are designed around the save system.
Yes, I suppose that can happen. The only games I've seen that explicitly want you to die or finish quickly though are the new-style games that give you better tools for your next run based on how you did on the current one. I'm playing several games like that right now (card games that unlock new cards as you "progress"). Most games that advertise permadeath also advertise "die often" as part of the package.
In any case, the main reason I brought it up is that I really like 80s/early 90s style roguelikes (esp. Omega and Moria), which match your criteria except for the save game issue, which never bothered me back in the day because I kept save archives.