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My group recently suffered their first death since crossing to Pathfinder. As the GM I was amazed at how the Raise Dead/Resurrection process works, particularly the rules around the penalties that the character incurs, those being 2 negative levels that can be restored using the Restoration spell (s).
It seems to me that is hardly a penalty for dying, particuarly at higher levels when each party should have a cleric that can perform those spells easily.
I fear that this could lead to players becoming nonchallant about their characters being killed.
I am thinking of re-instating the permanent -1 Con point that was used in the old system a few editions ago.
I was wondering if anyone else felt this way and if they had created a house rule to impose a penalty?
Lots of people have tried to make the death penalty more serious. Permanent HP loss, negative levels that can't be removed until you've earned a level's worth of XP, banning resurrection entirely, and so on.
Still, even RAW it's 7000gp of components to raise someone and restore their negative levels, which is non-trivial until you reach a pretty high level.
And in most games, you can just get a new character with full level and equipment whenever you want.
Well yeah, if you have someone in the party that can cast Restoration. If you don't, it'll be annoying until you get to one that can.
That's also why you should up the ante. Normal death isn't meant to be too big of a deal with players at high levels. You should instead do things with Magic Jar or the Outer Plans or rays of disintegration. You can seal the body in a block of diamond surrounded by an anti-magic field if you want to make things... difficult.
As the GM, you can also simply say the resurrection failed for "some reason" that turns out to be the hook for a "venture into hell" style adventure (might want to come up with something for the dead character's player to do for that adventure...)
So yeah, a plain old killing sucks, but level 15 characters are kind of meant to be rather awesome.