...even Achilles wasn't able to be "raised". No one was able to challenge Gilgamesh, but even he had to accept his own mortality. The heroes of WuXia frequently do stunts that most mortals can't even dream of, but they never come back from the dead.
Yes, but were these mighty heroes killed by bad luck with dice? No, they were killed by the story. There is a difference. If you remove
raise dead then a string of unfortunate rolls could kill your character...then it's game over, make a new one. In which case you could to the Beerfest method of replacing your dead character with his twin brother... who wants to go by his brother's name out of respect.
And making
raise dead difficult with all those epic quests down to the underworld, obtaining phoenix eggs, or whatever, just means one player has to sit out for a few sessions twiddling his thumbs while his friends go off on the "bring back the soul" adventure that is probably boring to them as well.
Of course, I never really saw
raise dead as much of a problem, because my group seems to have a zillion and one character ideas floating around in our heads, so when a character dies we gleefully make a new one.
p.s. There are plenty of dead-and-returned heroes. Gandalf came back from the dead. King Arthur is supposedly still alive, ready to come back, and superheroes and supervillains are famous for not staying dead.
