Andy Mallon explains row-level compression:
You can think of row compression as working by treating certain fixed-length data types as variable-length data types. By removing certain metadata, NULL and 0 values, and the padding of fixed-length values, SQL Server can reduce the total size of a row.
The easiest way to think of it is that char(n) no longer takes n bytes for every row, but instead gets treated more like varchar(n) where the storage used varies for each value. The behavior for each data type varies, with some data types getting more or less (or no) savings compared to others.
Row-level compression is the “safer” of the two primary compression options, but I almost never use it. That might just be a function of the my particular workloads, of course.