So, Wights have no method of actually dealing damage. They simply touch their intended target and energy drain them when they hit.
What the rules don’t really explain is what happens when a 1st Level (or 0th level for that matter) character is drained.
Do they die? That’s how we played it, but it felt weird because there was no rule for this in the Energy Drain description. And, if they don’t die when reduced, how does the wight slay their target?
Yes, they die! I’ll make that explicit. Thanks!
Great! No problem. 
Coming back to Energy Drain, I always disliked the level loss because of the game coming to a stop because of adjusting a character’s abilities is too much “work” during the game.
i’m strongly considering houseruling this (again): instead of xp loss and level reduction is use:
-1 cumulative penalty per lost level instead of actual level loss. This penalty applies to all throw values (perhaps to damage rolls too. not sure). If penalty equals class level you are dead. This penalty cannot reduced by natural healing, only a restore/wish spell removes one point from the penalty per casting…
any other suggesstions?
Meh. If energy drains are appearing so often as to become a bookkeeping problem, you are probably GM’ing a little too hard. Speaking from experience, drain-heavy campaigns just cause player frustration in having their hard-earned XP arbitrarily taken away, or they just end up spending all of their characters’ gold on drain-proofing items.
On a related note, the entry on energy drain mentions the ritual spell restoration, but that spell isn’t actually in the book.