Fudging rolls is the path to the dark side...

Depends heavily on what you and your players want out of the game. In all the campaigns I've been in the focus has been storytelling and character growth, so having a character die to some random happening would be counterproductive.

There have been situations within those campaigns where we've done things knowing that character death was a possibility, though, and in those cases we've carried through if the dice fell that way. The key is having buy-in from both player and DM on those particular moments of risk. Even a regular combat could turn into one of those if the player decides to press forward into danger.