In terms of combat this gets more difficult, because death usually means Game Over.
You approach this question with the assumption that death is the only outcome for combat.
But there are many other possible outcomes. There are lots of RPGs where you have a scripted "you lose a fight and get captured" scene. JRPGs love to do this in particular, but plenty of western RPGs have such a scene too. Usually the fight is impossible so you HAVE to lose and get captured. It is also the only fight in the game where that happens.
Why not make this a bit more universal? Depending on which group you fight, losing might not result in death, but merely unconsciousness (D&D already provides us with a good basis for this: characters are not dead until they hit -10 HP, they only lose consciousness and are bleeding out at 0) or surrender. Sure, a pack of rabid wolves is probably gonna eat you. But maybe you can sacrifice a companion and crawl away. Maybe add some kind of skillcheck to it, and base the likelihood of the wolves caring on how accessible your meat is (the wizard who only wears a robe is easier to eat than the knight in plate armor) and how tasty you are (maybe dwarf meat tastes horrible). Leads to a cool "Wolves managed to beat me down but I left my companion behind and crawled away while they ate his corpse" story.
With human enemies, it becomes even easier. Bandits fight you. They beat you down until you're almost dead. Then one of them offers you the chance to surrender. If you accept, they take all your shit but let you live. You can make non-combat skills count here too: if the character you play is an agile dancer chick with high sleight of hand, she can easily hide that valuable magic amulet in her cleavage, where the bandits won't look cause they don't wanna come across as pervs.
The most obvious place for non-lethal combat is the arena. There's plenty of INCLINE games that have arenas: Age of Decadence and Underrail come to mind. Both of these have arena fights end in death... even though the gladiators are big name dudes who have several victories under their belts and probably have major fan clubs. And both games are set in post-apocalyptic worlds with low population density. If every arena fight ends in death for one fighter, no exception, they're gonna run out of fighters at some point... and they will keep losing the best guys just because they had an unlucky day, which will likely cause their fans to stop attending arena fights cause that one fight was TOTAL BULLSHIT BOOOOO.
Instead, arena fights should be about injuring the other guy until he surrenders. Like it was in ancient Rome. There, gladiators had fan clubs, they had rivalries with other gladiators, they'd get re-matches against the same guy... fights were sometimes lethal but usually not. Most of the time gladiators surrendered when wounded, and as long as they put up a good show, they were allowed to live (the whole "Emperor condemns losing gladiator to death" meme we see a lot in sword and sandal movies happened rarely, especially when it comes to veteran gladiators).
This would work especially well in a ruleset with a wound system instead of pure HP bar reduction. It would also allow for some interesting non-combat quests in the arena instead of turning it into a linear sequence of progressively harder fights: you can form friendships and rivalries with other gladiators, you can do quests like "pls put this weakening posion into my rival's water so I can beat him more easily in our next fight" with consequences like
the gladiator found out you poisoned his water and beats you up in a dark alley at night as a warning.
Add alternate outcomes to combat than the binary "either side A dies or side B dies" and you've got a whole lot of new possibilities.
