That's an excellent question.
We pegged the new prices to be roughly 10% of a typical character's wealth at the level when a cleric could cast the spell.
For instance, raise dead at 5000 is 10% of the wealth of a typical 10th-level character. (It's about 14% of the wealth of a 9th-level character, the minimum level at which raise dead could be cast.)
Resurrection, at 10,000, is about 9% of the wealth of a 13th-level character, while true resurrection (25K) is about 7.5% of the wealth of a 17th-level character.
This encourages the party to use its own resources for raising, etc., rather than relying only on the "clerics in town." That means more clerics packing raise dead (or a raise dead scroll) for dungeon explorations, which means more in-adventure raises, which means fewer mandatory retreats from the dungeon.
This change was based on a couple conclusions:
1) Raising from the dead was too cheap. It wasn't "special" or even "unusual"--it was so commonplace as to place significant strains on the believability of the system.
2) By the time your party cleric could raise the dead, no character in the party would willingly agree to a raise dead, since true resurrection was dirt-cheap and didn't cost a level. That meant that characters never raised their own dead unless there was simply no other option. If a character died in the first encounter, the party went back to town to get him true-rezzed, even if the rest of the group was at full strength. That really puts a crimp in the flow of an adventure, and forces the players to weigh their odds of success against the fun of letting all the players play. That was an unfair decision to force on the players, in our opinions.
This second point was actually more problematic to us, as it meant that one of the cleric's roles (bringing his comrades back from the dead) was essentially being ignored. With the higher prices, the typical 9th-level PC can't afford true resurrection without going into severe hock, which means that he's happy to take the party cleric's raise dead (and thus keep the adventure moving ahead).
By tying the increased cost to the material component value (rather than adding an XP cost to the caster, for instance), characters can easily barter for the service. Don't have 5000 gp to get your buddy raised? OK, we'll raise him and then you can take on this low-level quest for the church to repay us. That gives the DM the power to increase character access to such effects, if he so chooses.
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Andy Collins
Senior Designer
Wizards of the Coast RPG R&D
INSULT!
