I've been playing since 1979. My first exposure was at college, which involved good old-fashioned dungeoncrawls, characters zapping in and out in the middles of dungeons, parties with wild mixtures of level and alignment, the whole nine yards. If your fellows carried you out of the dungeon (usually in a portable hole) and coughed up enough money for the relevant spell, you could come back. Antideath technology is no problem in this sort of game.
In more structured, storylike campaigns, I've always had a problem with resurrection. When I ran a campaign in a society with a Norse pantheon, I found that the Norse gods in the Dietes & Demigods couldn't cast resurrection spells, so I ruled that no clerics could do what their gods couldn't. When a PC died in-game, however, the players wanted her back so badly that I decided there was a wizard who could cast Wish. I set up his castle Wizard Humfrey-style, so that you could only get in to see him if you passed all his tests, and could then dicker with him to get the spell you wanted. Being so powerful, he could kick you out at any time - beating his tests only put him under obligation to listen to you, not to do anything. Wish did not come cheap, so in this case defeating death had all kinds of campaign possibilities. It helped that I had a small group who played multiple characters (her player wanted Bree back because she was engaged to his paladin, and the others agreed that, in real life, if you could bring a friend back cured from the dead after wererats ate her, you'd move heaven and earth to do so), so no one had to get left out or roll up a new character to participate.
I hardly ever kill people, but I've decided not to allow raising the dead in my present campaign because I don't want to deal with the differences in society that would result from the availability of such technology, and I didn't want to ignore it either.
Oddly enough, we had character deaths when I was a player in Waterdeep, where any kind of absurd magic is available if you want it badly enough, but we didn't bring them back. This was partly due to the players of the characters, however, who didn't get as attached to their PCs as the rest of us did. In one case, nobody really liked the PC in question. The best eulogy we could come up with at Marek's funeral was: "He was a jerk, but he was our jerk."
The last time I saw Raise Dead used was in a Roman-flavored campaign in which the PCs were the "confidential staff" of a powerful senator. Death, shmeth, nobody kicked us around! We lost one person, a brand new hire, in our first adventure, and my cleric subsequently became fanatical about it never happening again. When she became high enough level she made a "Rod of Comforting the Staff" which could Heal, Break Enchantment, Raise Dead, and even Detect Curse. This worked because of the mileu. If anybody could defy death, it was people at the upper echelons of the Empire - and that was us.
