The good thing about death in this game when you join a Battle or make an Army .
It makes you have to think shall i join and help . Shall i make an Army and go on a Steamroller .. and at the end have no Lords left ...It slows the player down and makes him think in what he is going to do .. play the long game.. more real to life.. yes some little changes needed .. but all in all its needed..
No it doesn't
You basically have two choices right now:
1. Auto-Resolve/Simulate to avoid Character Deaths, but probably lose battles you could win and or suffer much heavier losses
2. Actively participate in battles (way the game is meant to be played) and see how Russian Roulette goes for you
OR
Participate in battles but never have any companions with you or never fight in Armies for that matter
So that leaves you with raiding settlements and fighting smaller Party vs. Party battles as the safe route. While this is effective, it basically defeats the whole Kingdom/Army aspect of the game. Generally speaking joining an Army will rarely do the player much good, since you'll be losing a lot of Troops due to poor A.I. Creating an Army yourself can have good results, but the fact you can lose several Lords in a battle you clearly win just the defeats the purpose of player involvement.
There is a chance for lords to die in simulations, it's just super duper small. Way back when they introduced the feature of lords dying in battle, they said they kept it low in simulations and high in real battle for the purposes of testing how death worked.
This does not appear to be the case anymore. It was this way for awhile, but it's either broken or they turned it off. That or it's like .001%
Factions don't really snowball now. That was fixed, for the most part, in 1.5.8.
Yeah but they will after a few decades, granted that may not be considered "snowballing". Basically if you play long enough and don't reload battles constantly in your favor;
your Kingdom and neighboring Kingdoms will be so depleted on Lords as to stand no chance against distant Kingdoms later on. Granted this would be a non-issue if they lowered the death rate - BUT that hasn't happened yet.
TW could also just give players the option to adjust the Death Rate. They already let us adjust damage and battle size, why not give power to the players and make everyone happy?