Somewhere in every long campaign there is a roll that matters. The death save, failed. The dragon's breath, not dodged. The room goes quiet in a way that has nothing to do with the game and everything to do with the people in it. Someone has to decide what the fiction costs.
Stakes are the story
A character who cannot die is a character in a different genre. The possibility of loss is what converts a sequence of encounters into a narrative — it is the difference between a story and a slideshow. Players know this instinctively. The fear in their voices during a real boss fight is not performance. It is the sound of caring about something imaginary, which is to say caring, full stop.
Fudging the roll feels like kindness. It is usually theft. It steals the meaning of every risk the table took to get there, and it teaches the players — quietly, permanently — that the danger was never real.
Grief is part of play
When a character dies well, the table mourns. Not theatrically — genuinely, awkwardly, the way people mourn anything they built together over months. That grief is not a failure of the game. It is the proof the game worked. The new character sheet, filled out the following week, is not a replacement. It is a sequel.
Roll in the open. Let the dice fall where they land. The story you get will be worse than the one you planned — and better than the one you could have protected.