BelenUmeria, I think your ideas for necromantic corruption and soul bonded items are fine from a mechanics point of view, and would help to greatly add your own personal feel to your world. Your players are simply whining because you've moved away from the 3E "something for nothing" ideology. In previous editions, haste, raise dead, and other spells had a cost (aging, system shock rolls, etc) to prevent their rampant overuse and abuse by players. The new edition seems to indicate that these should be staple spells rather than spells used in certain circumstances, which is fine in and of itself. However, 3E is protraying a very different D&D that previous editions- its much more of a "powerup" D&D- hence the videogame analogies.
Now, D&D does have its own flavor and style, but to many people, the flavor presented by default in the core books is not to their liking, so they make house rules (like you did, I have, and countless others) to better reflect how they want their world to operate. Thats cool too- you just have to make sure the players know about those changes that will affect them. Core D&D is very high-powered vanilla- that is, rather bland and without any real distinguishing features. D&D handles its own tropes and designs well, but does not port over well to a setting like Middle Earth, Hyborea, or the Thieves World books well. Heck, even Dragonlance has tons of mods from standard D&D, and it WAS a game played under the system. D&D is the bare-bones skeleton for portraying generic fantasy. If you're happy with that, more power to you. But if you want something more, you have to make certain modifications to insure those aspects of your world that are different have REASONS for being different.
They wanna play hard ball, I play hard ball.
