Am running ROTRL and am halfway through book 3 have had 2 deaths one was mitigated by a resurrection an the other starter a new char.
Am using 4d6 build an traits an hero points
The hero points have saved a few more deaths in the group
Second Darkness, Book 3. Two deaths so far. One led to a new character; the other we got back with a Raise Dead scroll. If we count deaths averted by Hero Points and Breath of Life, then the number jumps to seven.
For our group, death is still a pretty big concern even though we now have more tools to mitigate it. Three of the four PCs are original party members, and we're all very attached to our characters (currently 10th level). While we have access to Raise Dead, circumstances don't always make that a viable option (like when you have to conceal your clerical powers in the Darklands. . . .
Edit: added second paragraph.
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When I am a player I rarely die. My group generally has a cleric who can save us in the "I have one hit point" times and later levels we all buy scrolls of heal or reach heal to save us quick. I play with another group where I loaded my imp familiar up with scrolls of raise dead (we though scrolls only used a standard action no matter the casting time) and he flew around bringing us back a total of 10 scrolls on one day. That is a very high death rate but we all accept it and fight to live. It's fun but we worry less on backstory in that game. My other games though we have great stories and almost never die unless we choose to.
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A rogue who doesn't flank. A spell focused druid (with a Domain) who barely ever casts spells and uses his wildshape ~2min a day to fly where he doesn't want to risk failing a climb check... and his standard action is mostly using Lighting Arc with a +1 Dex to hit...
Why is his wild shape only 2 minutes per day? Archetype? Because wild shape is hours per level per use.
I don't see death happen that often, but I do see a bit of soft-hearted GMing. In the last campaign I ran 4 PCs lived through, one player died once and got retired a second time and another player died once. I had to go very soft to not kill 2 more players in the 3rd session. I let them buy whatever they wanted and they bought 2 elephants. So I recalculated the APL including the elephants and figured they could take a dragon turtle. The players with the elephants got worried about them and told them to retreat. So they were in over their heads and I had the monster retreat with one corpse and leave the unconscious characters alive rather than fighting and killing everyone who didn't run. The second death was in a nasty fight against some daemon with Stinking Cloud, and the guest star PCs were really merfolk assassins, one of whom hit her 35% chance to use the Black Tentacles scroll to set up a killing field. One PC, one Guest star and the daemon all died in that fight. Another sought out and befriended the head of the Druid religion knowing full well the guy was 4,000 years old and Neutral Evil. He is still working for the guy in exchange for room and board.
In the course of a ~5 year campaign we've had a total of between fifteen and twenty dead PCs. One was resurrected with a resurrection scroll, two more came back to life after drawing Void Cards from a Deck of Many things as the result of another artifact the party gained access to after a brutal dungeon. Another was reanimated as an undead and later resurrected before dying a final time saving the soul of a friend.
The rest of lay were they fell.
We've had a few close calls though, and more than one breath of life.
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In the many campaigns I have run over the years, the death rate has varied greatly. I think when you are with a group for a while, you get a feel for what they like as well as what you like when dealing with death. I've had characters from "I died once and was resurrected. If I die again, I'm staying on the other side." to "I died again. How much does it cost?". Personally, I'm good either way.
I think a lot of factors go into it. I remember switching from 2nd Edition to 3.0 when it was new. Threw a couple of Ettins and bears at the party and got a real wake up call about what Reach and Attack of Opportunity really meant. So did the party. :) That wasn't their fault.
Then there was the low level guy that charged the Hill Giants at the top of a hill. That was stupid.
Ultimately, the point of the game is to have fun. Even to know your character died once can be painful in itself. No one wants to be "that guy" that always gets creamed because of stupidity. If the party is getting slaughtered even though they are playing smart, then the encounter is too tough...and that is the fault of the DM.
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My first and only PC death was in Round One of a boss fight, where my unhinged aberrant halfling sorcerer said exactly the wrong thing to a spiteful large-sized villain with a X4 crit weapon. One confirmed crit later, and he was dad from full HP with no hope of Life getting Breathed back into him.
We chose not to raise him, because I found it the most appropriate time & place for him to die, I was afraid of that character getting into the endgame, and the group wasn't cohesive at all. Two other people died in that AP (Jade Regent), and the new characters got along well.
In Kingmaker, we just got through Book One, and have had four deaths, three of which were from the same player who got bored with his character ideas (except for the first one, who left when nobody could stand him). Other players left, but their characters didn't die.
Somebody posted a similar thread in the PFS forum not long ago, and I believe the average people settled on was around one death per 9 or 10 games. In other words, pretty darn low. But that's PFS. At this point, as others have pointed out here, if you stick to the CR system as written, even moderately optimized parties will usually walk all over it.
In my home games, I like to deal with "the death issue" via two methods. First, I have completely removed access to Costco style resurrection magic. There are several ways to bring someone back to life, but they all involve lost artifacts, journeys to the underworld, quests performed on behalf of fickle dieties, harvesting the bone marrow of a phoenix, etc.
Second, I use action points. Each player receives two action points per game, which they can pool, and which have various uses. One thing they can do is spend 3 action points to negate a character death at the moment it happens. The character that just died is instead stable at -(Con) hit points. The character in question must then be healed to half max hp and must rest for 8 hours before he will regain consciousness. There are, obviously, situations wherein this mechanic is not available to them, such as effects that completely destroy the PC's body, etc. Also, during climactic sessions the action point cost to negate death rises to 4 or 5.
Overall, this seems to work wonders. Death is meaningful, but the PCs have some feeling of control over it. Most importantly, it prevents events as significant as death and resurrection from turning into a banal routine.