Two days ago The Rules Lawyer posted a YouTube video called Why there’s a DM shortage in D&D. The cover picture shows angry young people exclaiming, "You Killed Us! You're a bad DM" and a subtitle, "Player Entitlement & The 'Illusion of Difficulty' Problem in D&D".
I do not seek to talk about Dungeons & Dragons, but I am curious about the Illusion of Difficulty, because I have not experienced it. Does it happen in Pathfinder?
The Illusion of Difficulty is the GM setting up an encounter that has little risk of killing a PC but gives the impression that the party is in great danger. The issue came up because a DM posted about his unease in having killed a PC in a challenging encounter against a lich. The lich cast Power Word Kill. A lot of players commenting in the forum advocated that a lich should never use Power Word Kill despite it being in its stat block. Apparently, if the enemy is capable of killing a PC, then they should hold back because killing a PC would be going too far.
I have not had a player death in my campaigns since an unlucky pair of dice rolls during Spires of Xin-Shalast, the 6th module in Rise of the Runelords, back in 2012. My players prefer teamwork that protects their teammates. If a player character is at risk, that character is encouraged to back off and let the rest of the party take the brunt of the enemy damage, and if a player character is down, they will defend and heal that character immediately.
Furthermore, my players love tactics, so they are excited by a challenge in which straightforward hack-and-slash combat would lose, but a little cleverness in exploiting an enemy's blind spots quickly turns the tables. In evaluating those blind spots and weaknesses, they accurately judge the true difficulty of the encounter.
My wife did point out that she can rely on me to give level-appropriate encounters, so the players know that they can beat the challenge no matter how scary it seems (or that if I intended for them to run, then I would have foreshadowed warnings). I view that as Balanced Difficulty rather than Illusion of Difficulty. And she would expect a lich with Power Word Kill to cast Power Word Kill.
I'm not a fan of player deaths because of lone bad rolls or randomness, but if the PCs are fighting a higher level boss opponent (especially in PF2) the chance of death isn't out of the question.
That said, as a GM and player I usually prefer there to be some in place narrative reason that the PCs can quickly overcome death (if the player wants). It sucks to lose a character you're invested in, and I don't want to see a treadmill of characters coming in because of PC death.
So...don't pull punches but also have something set up so that death isn't permanent and doesn't mean losing the character (unless the player wants) and also that the time the player doesn't have access to their character is minimized. Because no one wants to wait 6 sessions for their character to be resurrected while the party is having fun and you sit on the sidelines.