Quote Originally Posted by Mechalich View Post
*statistics snipped*
I'm well aware that on a global scale raise dead is relatively common, but it's the local scale the small chances of having a raise-capable cleric in a given settlement are noticeable. If Baron Joe dies in Joeburg, a small city that rolled the 25% chance of not having a raise-capable cleric, and the next city is more than 9 days away on a galloping horse, he's out of luck. If Joeburg is a metropolis, Baron Joe is CN, and the four randomly-rolled high-level clerics are LG, LG, LN, LE and refuse to raise insufficiently-lawful people, he's out of luck.

And that's just clerics. Druids - which have a really weird demographic presence in D&D - can bring people back from the dead starting at 7th level using reincarnate, which is both cheaper and doesn't care about the condition of remains. Yes, it sticks you in a new form, but there are various ways around this.
Assuming druids are willing to bring back a noble who spent all his time cutting down forests to build his towns and flattening hills to build his roads and didn't even pay lip service to revering nature, which again isn't a guarantee.

Additionally, you don't actually need a 9th level caster to cast raise dead, you just need a divine caster of any level with a raise dead scroll (which only costs 6125 gp).
This is true...but of course a cleric with CL below 9 has a chance of failing to cast the spell from the scroll and having a mishap instead, which one shouldn't chance with raise dead lest the person Come Back Wrong.

Ed Greenwood's paragraph about the laws actually confirms this. It's special pleading on the part of the author intended to neutralize a distortional effect built into the rules that would ruin the feel of the world he tried to generate. In point of fact, banning the use of a rare but exceedingly valuable process from access by the upper classes is the exact opposite of how social systems work.
Except that "the upper classes" include both King Bob who would like to get resurrected upon his untimely death and Crown Prince Bob Junior who would like to inherit the kingdom upon King Bob's untimely death, to say nothing about various Cousin Robs and Uncle Roberts in the line of succession and Dubiously Evil Vizier al'Bob who might also want a piece of things. If nobles don't want to hand back their wealth to resurrected ancestors and kind-hearted nobles don't want to see their families disrupted by succession crises and nations torn by civil war after their passing, that sort of law is a perfectly reasonable one to pass.


Look, I'm not trying to argue resurrection doesn't happen a lot in D&D and affect the setting; like I said, I run it by-the-book in my games and there are plenty of twice- or thrice-resurrected rich people running around, noble families who keep scrolls of resurrection and experts with high Use Magic Device modifiers on retainer, and cities where the legal code allows you to portion out inheritances only after the resurrection timer runs out. I'm just saying that the common perception that death loses all meaning in D&D settings is false, because there are plenty of existing flavor and mechanical reasons why "Just resurrect him!" isn't the solution to any and every death-related plot point, and you don't need to ban or heavily houserule resurrection effects to prevent society from becoming unrecognizable.