| saundby |
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For my game, there are basically two reasons characters die:
1. The player made a series of bad or extremely risky choices and the dice didn't deliver the "one in a million" they needed to pull it off.
2. The situation looks really ugly and they choose to have their character make "the greatest sacrifice" for the sake of the rest of the party/the quest/etc.
For this reason I build my encounters with a lot of scalability and usually a deus ex machina built in. Because you just can't tell how things are going to go in planning it. A player may not show that you expected, the dice may choose to be less random than you'd hope, a player may not be on top of their characters' abilities (how dare they come to a game tired and foggy after a double shift!) Etc., etc.
I do try to get them all thinking really hard and pushing their characters while trying to rescue a situation. The risk of character death has to be there, in their minds, at least, even if you're not necessarily going that far.
Sometimes it happens (see 1. and 2. above.) But if it happens well, nobody starts thinking about what else they could be doing with their evenings. Instead, they're all talking about the character, how their absence will affect the story from an in-story perspective, how the character lived and died and how their characters are reacting to it.
My advice: play it as it's fun to play for you and your players. Don't let "what's right" get in the way. Figure out what gets everyone to the table and deliver that with lots of flavor.