Just that you didn't have infinite chances as you were running out of lives. If you died in Wolfenstein you would reset to a pistol start too. (who really compared scores instead of the actual stats of the map?)īut that's all really. And scores were arcady and didn't really add anything either. Lives were pointless, since they didn't add anything to the game. It was something they figured out along the way of Doom development. No, while it's true they wanted to do away with lives and scores. It's also why every map in the iwads is beatable from pistol start-they wanted the punishment to be that it would be more difficult for you to progress in the game, not that the game was impossible to beat if you died.
So, yes, pistol start was a very conscious design decision that was meant to be a punishment for dying (i.e., you lost all your weapons, almost all your ammo, and your armor).
Think of it like 1 life, but with infinite continues. So they came up with the mechanic where if you die, you start that level over with 100% health and just a pistol. Scoring was easy enough to remove, but there had to be some consequence to dying without forcing you to start the entire game over. According to Romero (I think he says it during one of the Devs Play videos), when iD was developing Doom they were trying to remove some of the elements of Wolfenstein that had more of an arcade feeling to them: scoring and lives.