How to keep player data persistent, past death-exits?

[wildweasel]

Many vanilla and Boom-compatible megawads lately are making heavy use of death-exits as a way to force players to start from a fresh spawn and clear the inventory. I can understand this from a mapper's viewpoint, especially in those megawads not designed for continuous play, but sometimes a gameplay mod really needs to hang on to some pieces of player data, especially RPG stats and other such things. Is there an acceptable way to make sure that this data is kept, even past a death-exit?

[Ed the Bat]

Death-exits are a primitive way to simulate having separate episodes in engines that wouldn't support that in MAPINFO/ZMAPINFO. Starting a new episode from the menu, as in Ultimate/Registered Doom, would likewise start with a clean slate of all inventory (including RPG tokens or the like), or even beginning a map with ResetInventory. Not to say I disapprove of what you're looking for. In fact, a clean and user-friendly way to preserve inventory when beginning a new episode would be nice as well. Something of a 'New Game+' feature instead of starting fresh.

[Blue Shadow]

Is there an acceptable way to make sure that this data is kept, even past a death-exit?

By storing this data in global variables or arrays. These are about the only thing forced pistol starts can't reset or destroy.