Character death should be something that can happen, with how I DM.

However, my goal is to never try and kill a character. With how I DM, I am wanting these characters to grow (both in levels, but also story wise) - whether through the backgrounds I am using that they created, or for my own story.

In the five years I have been DMing my current campaign, only one character managed to die, so far. A second death with their second character, was actually a planned one, that he had wanted to do - so I worked it into a story. (I originally had not allowed Artificers in my world - but they reached an area where I could see one fitting - so we planned a heroic death for the second character, to introduce the third character).

I will not, however, hesitate to kill a character who does something stupid - like, run up and stab a sleeping, ancient red dragon in the toe, when the rest of the party is trying to stealth out of the cave (or anything else like that).

Even when characters go down, I allow my players to do a Medicine check as an action - to try and stabilize the downed player. Any any failed Death Save or failed Medicine check (DC starts at 10), increases future Medicine checks by 1. So if they failed 1 death save, the first Medicine check is going to be DC 11.

All of this just so ideally, characters do not perish, but also adds a nice way of putting Medicine to good use (which takes their whole turn to do - flavored as attempting to bandage the downed player).