Concerned that save or die is too rough? Convinced that there would be some way to avoid automatic death from the ceiling crushing the players? Don’t want anything bad to happen to you players? Like to fudge those dice?I've heard arguments from Dungeon Master's who fudge the dice to "help the players out" or "make sure they have fun". It's equally idiotic to eat ice cream and cheese cake constantly to lose weight. When what you do has the opposite effect of why you're say you're doing it, then you either don't understand what you're doing, or you're disconnected from reality.
If it is not possible to die or miss treasure or lose - if the only path is the one to victory, then there is no victory at all. When you cheat and lie by mis-reporting the results on the dice, then you are cheating the players of their free will and any sense of accomplishment they may gain.
Without consequences, there can be no meaning or value to decisions made. If nothing bad can happen then nothing the players do matters. As the Dungeon Master you are responsible for not ruining their fun in this way.
The key here is player choice and empowerment. Go ahead and give a death trap or two a try (along with appropriately rich rewards in other places) and see how much more engaged your players become when they realize the choices they make matter. Then watch how much fun they have to strive with the honest possibility of loss and snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.
When you "help the player's out" by removing consequences then they won't ever learn to become better players. When you "make sure they have fun" by removing their agency and the value of their choices, the end result isn't someone feeling like they are awesome.
I want to be clear about what I'm saying. This isn't to say when it's 11pm at night and people have to leave that you can't hand wave getting camp set up. It doesn't mean that you forget that you're a person sitting in a room with other people. It just means that there are no save points or take backs. Always allowing players to redo their choice when they discover that it has consequences (setting off a trap, or, uh, aaaahhhhchoodrawing an attack of opportunity).
I post this because it's about having a good time. You are playing a game with people. If they always win, and there's no downside to any game, then they will not have as good a time. This isn't about being mean, or berating players or anything. They should make informed choices, where they know the consequences (or they should know that they don't know what the consequences will be). They should just be held accountable for those choices, and the results. If they stand firm to hold off the bugbears, then they might die. If you don't kill them then that will devalue the choice they made to hold off the bugbears.
If they win, then the glory is real.
