DM_Blake said:
Why not?
We accept fireballs as a "given". We accept flame strike spells as a "given" - and that requires the same kind of caster using the same level spell lost as Raise Dead.
In a world where all kinds of wonderful magic exists, unicorns, flaming swords, leprechauns, drgons, djinni, wish spells, teleporting, flying carpets, heck, there's millions of magical mystical things in D&D, why is raise dead so special that we need ruling to limit its use?
Because
raise dead has tremendous impact on the fundamentals of society.
Fireball doesn't imply a change in the very nature of the world; it's just another way to blow stuff up. We can do that in reality, we just need a bit more gadgetry. Dragons are more of a stretch, but still, a dragon is not so different from a fighter jet in terms of its capability to affect the world around it.
Offhand, the only spell I can think of that compares to
raise dead in its implications for the game world is
teleport. And that, too, looks like it's getting some hefty restrictions in 4E.
Now, can you construct an imaginary society that incorporates both of these things and is still internally consistent? Sure. But you have to build that society from the ground up. The permanence of death is the foundation for all kinds of traditions, legends, laws, behavior patterns, social structures, and on and on and on. (The necessity of passing through points in between when going from A to B has fewer social but almost as many geopolitical implications, and more strategic/military ones.) You can't just slap 3E
raise dead onto a boilerplate medieval-fantasy world and have it make sense.
As Stogoe said, in previous editions the Immortal-Oligarchy rule was the default. Apparently the 4E designers concluded that most people don't have much interest in building their game worlds around the ability to raise the dead.
DM_Blake said:
Again, I say this is a campaign setting decision. ... But this variance should be up to the DM without having it explicitly ruled in the core rulebooks.
There will be a default behavior for
raise dead, no matter what, and that default is determined by whatever is or is not in the core books. Leaving the restriction out carries just as much weight as putting it in. The 4E designers have decided that the default should be "resurrection is flat-out impossible for 99% of people in 99% of circumstances," and I have to say I agree with them.
If you don't like the limitation, you will have to house-rule it out of your campaigns, true. But that requires no more effort than for me to house-rule it
into mine. In fact it requires less effort, because you only have to strike out an existing rule whereas I would have to make up a new one. And since I very much doubt this particular rule has any game-balance implications (since it applies to NPCs only), striking it out should be as simple as saying "It doesn't work this way in my world."
One of us is going to have to house-rule. There's no way around that. 4E's requirement that you house-rule is no more onerous than 3E's requirement that I do so.