At higher levels death can be just another minor setback to a player, little worse than blindness or petrification. This does not sit comfortably with some gamers.
So if you have made death more significant, with heavy penalties or flat out impossible how have you balanced that out in game and out?
How have you dealt with the player who cannot play because the party need to go on a side quest to get the maguffin to bring them back?
How do you keep your core narrative intact when the party is now comprised of no original party members, just their second cousins, prisoners who wanted to join the party after being freed and random strangers your party felt a strange affinity for?
Where do you prefer to sit on the 'deaths revolving door' to 'hello, insta-buddy' spectrum?
Me, I find 'deaths revolving door' far less disruptive to the narrative than 'insta-buddy'. I find that it is far more player friendly too. I can live with the difficulties this causes. I use a baseline assumption that no-one wants to return from death, but PCs are PCs and I have no control over that. This means that nobles don't customarily horde 5000gp diamonds and raise dead is not cast often as it is known it usually fails.
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One simple but very often overlooked solution is to simply make sure PCs don't die so much.
Seventeen raise deads in a campaign feels like a revolving door, but just one doesn't. A string of replacement characters might result in a "no originals" party, but one or two can fit into the narrative quite easily.
When death is rare, your methods of handling death are less important.
The only issue is that a lot of people (particularly those who first developed their gaming habits back when it was a spin-off of a wargame) see the possibility of death as the primary tension. The PCs must be challenged, and that challenge must come in the form of potentially-fatal encounters.
But if you take a look at pretty much any other narrative medium besides D&D, you discover that the vast majority of great narrative tension isn't about whether the main character(s) will die. More often, it's about solving the mystery or racing the clock or changing someone's mind or finding the thing or defusing the situation or... you get the idea.
Put something at stake other than the PCs' lives, and suddenly it doesn't make a lot of difference how you handle PC death—and you'll probably also end up with a better story at the same time! :)
Jiggy is right. And here's how to make death more rare: The Alexandrian death houserules. You don't immediately go unconscious until you're below your negative max hitpoint value. Healing spells work no matter how many negative hitpoints you have. You're not permadead until you've been past your death threshold for 24 hours. Rez spells don't exist, because there's no need for them to.
It really depends on the type of story you are trying to tell - I think both points have a valid narrative focus.
If you are playing a lethal campaign it should be so from the start - and not something you change up suddenly - and I also believe that you can incorporate 'other stakes' in a game that is lethal. The key point is that deaths are fair - not 'you get no choice in the matter you are dead' - but instead 'if you decide that trying to walk across a narrow beam of slippery wood floating on a lake of green slime then don't look at the GM when you are re-rolling stats.'
I personally don't have a problem with lethal encounters or even things that are way out of the players league - but with the idea that if they approach an ancient dragon's lair there will be dozens of warning signs and 'you should turn around' moments - if the players ignore all that ... well that's what new sheets are for.
I wouldn't make a player sit out due to death though - roll something up and we'll fit you into the story - almost every fantasy story has the party running into allies in strange places....
I don't mind the "revolving door", but I like to make death more a plot problem than a PC problem. Instead of imposing taxes and debuffs, force the party to owe someone a favor, or to let a bad guy get away. Have the character come back with a hitchhiking spirit along for the ride.
The fear of death can also bring things to a grinding halt. Granted, my group is almost infamous for overthinking things, but before Pathfinder we were playing a modern spy-based game. It's on hiatus right now because we were getting way too risk-averse, to the point where the GM basically put a prize in front of a character built to acquire it ... and he let it go afraid of getting caught and the consequences thereof.
This is an extreme example, of course.
A player can come back into the games if he has a PC ready, and I get to a good place to bring him back in. In my games however I tend to only make certain fights difficult. Now sometimes the dice gods intervene and that easy fight is not so easy.
Back on topic: Typically there is some downtime or at least enough of a break to justify meeting a new character after a tough fight.
How do you keep your core narrative intact when the party is now comprised of no original party members, just their second cousins, prisoners who wanted to join the party after being freed and random strangers your party felt a strange affinity for?
Watch "Sliders" and "Babylon 5" for inspirational instruction on how to replace your core cast.
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Hero points are how I avoid the revolving door. You can always die to an unlucky roll or by being reckless. In either event, hero points give you a second chance to keep your beloved PC alive. Like most things in game though, HPs are a resource so manage them. If you dont have any HP, its lights out.
a good way to keep character death rare is to run a good fun campaign with competent players who enjoy playing together as a party and like what you are GMing for them
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