Spacethingy

One of my characters has a power that lets him heat metals, damaging everyone who touches them (ideally for scalding people's guns and making them drop their weapons). When I used the power on a robot, we weren't sure if it would actually damage the robot itself, or just everyone who touched it. Cue: "Is the robot touching itself?"

Not strictly relevant, but I once saw a build in this forum for a power that essentially gives the PC extra lives; I believe it was built as Regeneration (Resurrection only) with Charges, with a custom limitation "Player must provide an excuse for why the character is actually alive." The flavor being, of course, that the character heroically or luckily avoided death at the last second, ie the "My bible stopped the bullet" approach (or, alternatively, the "it was actually a robot that looked like me" approach). If you just declare that every character has this power with, say, two charges that never recover, then you can kill each character three times before the player needs to make a new one. A bit more breathing room for making a lethal campaign, while your players don't need to worry about making multiple characters for a while.

The cheaty traditional role-playing answer is that when Erik the wizard dies, the player introduces Berik the wizard, his twin brother. Personally, I would just ask players to make three characters and play as one of them, giving equal experience to each. If the first one dies, the next can join the party in the next village/city or somesuch. Though I do like the idea of one player having three characters they can switch out every session or so. Then they wouldn't need to adjust to a new character when one of them dies, and the party doesn't need to make an excuse to take on this new member. Plus, this means all the players get to play around with different character archetypes.

Maybe you could buy it as a unified cheap summon and resurrection with the limitation "requires polymorph spell." The flavor being, of course, that you summon the character as a random animal, say a badger or weasel, and then, once the supplies have been gathered, change the animal back into the original character. This has the bonus that the player can play as a cute little badger in the mean-time.

I feel as though Regeneration is probably the best option, though you might need to add Immortality (I'm just picturing an elf dying of old age... forever). Depending on the scale of the campaign, you might just be able to hand-wave it, using it as the flavor behind buying lots of skills. If the campaign only spans two in-game years, for example, most players might prefer to make a new character than play as a newborn or toddler.