I play a lot of OG Doom community maps, and used to play a fair bit of Quake community maps too. In each context it depends on personal preference and the challenge at hand. Quake like Doom 1 has an episodic structure where you lose all your weapons and stats at the end of each — so ‘pistol start’ is just not a thing worth pursuing (and with modern tools, authors are able to enforce these kinds of resets themselves if that’s how they intend their content to be played), so I’ve never bothered.
I will say the main difference between Doom & Quake is how much combat mechanics challenge contributes to the experience. Doom II has extremely tight weapon & enemy roster mechanics, and challenging combat can be a really inventive & rewarding experience that depends on balancing to your skill level. Many Doom maps I’ve really wanted to see how hard I can take and have set myself restrictions and practiced strategies and trained myself on to push myself, and it can be an absolutely awesome experience. To be brutally honest I have simply never felt this with Quake. Some maps are more challenging than others, and in recent years the community & Machine Games have managed to produce new mechanics and encounter designs that elevate the game massively, and the challenges are inventive and enjoyable — but I have never felt the desire to push myself beyond medium difficulty. Some players just really enjoy maxing things on hardest settings but even with amazing new innovations like the Quake Brutalist Jam conversion it is simply never as interesting to increase combat challenge as in Doom. This isn’t to say that Quake is a lesser game, but the enjoyment is far more in atmosphere and artistry.
As for saves policy, I just do it on gut feeling based on the map in question. But the modern source ports like IronWail implement auto save, and modern tooling allows authors to script that too. This can sometimes lead to you getting lazy with strategy if you come to rely on it, and very rarely the engine can ‘get it wrong’ and save you in a situation where you’re pretty much guaranteed to die and you’ll have to start from scratch. But again — just trust your gut. More so than Doom, I’d say — where many players use ZDoom and apply all sorts of ridiculous mods and settings to change core mechanics and experience — there really is no wrong way to play Quake.
Except that you should really use a community source port like IronWail or vkQuake: the official remaster Kex engine has some horrible input lag / prediction and rendering and audio modifications that diminish the experience IMO.
