As taken from the notes of Lex, RSC dimensional research division.
Multiversal cluster 525, area P-8A. Inhabitants of these worlds spawn in with anywhere from 1 to 100 lives, normally tending towards the upper half of that spectrum.
A player's life count is innate to them and is known at all times. There's no way to check, no way to lose count, and no way to figure out someone else's life count without asking them (or, I suppose, killing them until they don't respawn). Even if a player's memory is somehow entirely wiped, they'll still know exactly how many lives they have, as it is an innate sense.
It's generally considered impolite to ask someone's life count, as revealing it to someone else is seen as a sign of trust. Further culture around lives appears to be gladiatorial in nature, and a preferred form of entertainment is watching people risk their lives in various situations. (I was assured that everyone I saw had volunteered willingly, but I doubt that.)
There is almost no way to obtain more lives; players cannot give them to each other (see notes on area LL-26 for an example of a place where this is possible), and obtaining more through rituals is possible but generally considered unwise. Most people seem assured that there are things far worse than losing a life or two.
There's one other phenomenon, one nobody seemed willing to discuss but that I was able to find scraps of rumor on, called ∅. Players with ∅ lives can be killed infinitely, and will always come back. This makes them extraordinarily dangerous, to the point where some refer to them as "worldbreakers" or just "breakers" instead of just referring to them as having an infinite lifecount.
Research on this phenomenon has been incredibly difficult, but I've figured out there are in fact a few different ways this can happen. The first is quite possibly the most obvious -- certain entities that can be contracted will mess with player coding and manually set lives to ∅, a process that is heavily implied to be very painful. Having an entity root around in one's player data is, frankly, an awful idea. They won't just change your life count.
Second, it's possible that a few are innately born with ∅ lives due to something called an "unnatural spawn." Whereas most players will live out normal life cycles, some spawn into the world fully formed -- they remain the same age forever, and cannot be killed by normal means. Further research pending into the "unnatural spawn" phenomena, as I suspect it may be related to the majority of things called "worldbreakers." See section KJ-51 for more detail.
Third, there are players who simply refuse to die. They are by far the rarest of these three types, and as such very little is known about them -- only that a handful of people, on reaching their last life, will simply get back up again as if nothing had happened. Like an underflow error, their life count glitches out entirely. They no longer keep track of lives, and often care very little about how many times they die. Players who have refused to die and reached ∅ in this manner will throw themselves at the same problem over and over, chipping away at it, because there is nothing stopping them from wearing it down.
In effect, they have conquered Death.
