Community

For me, it depends.  Honestly, on the direction, seriousness, and physical irl time we have with this campaign. 

In a general serious campaign, I usually have some means to ressurect a party member who's fallen.  Btw, ALL of the players I've played with over the years are INCREDIBLY attatched to their characters.  I've even had a few who have been brought to tears at the table. 

For examples:

I have a goddess specifically devoted to forgivness and healing.  The temple are usuallty willing to aid adventurers, even raise fallen allies; but usually by way of asking them to a task.  That, and the party is also generally responsible for providing the raw diamond materials.  This usually surfices for a long winded; time is not a factor campaign where I can let the players go and do whatever.

In more time sensitive cases, I usually include a healer with the party (the class, Healer), which significantly reduces chances of death. 

In a recent campaign I ran, the players had a Jumi Healer with them.  The Jumi are a race I stole from Legend of Mana (for those old school ps1 fans).  In their chest, is a massive gem, the crystalized essence of their soul.  In my world setting, a Jumi may shed a tear upon a fallen comrad, and revive them.  However, the Jumi takes 1/2 that character's HD in perminent CON damage; fracturing their core gem, that cannot be restored after 24 hours.  In this campaign, the softspoken Jumi Healer has had to revive two particuarlly close comrads once each, leaving him with a 6 CON.  The role play of the kind character hiding his pain (as he's literallty damaging his soul for his friends) in order to shrug off any worry is interesting.  One of the players has taken up a personal quest to find some way to restore his core, leading to interesting possible adventure hooks.  

I always try and get my players invested in their characters because I think it leads to much better roleplaying. That said, I feel much the same way as Gaius, that it's unfair to encourage that and then snuff out the player's investment in that character with a character death which, let's face it, could happen at any time due a series of unfortunate dice roles.

If I know that a character is low on HP I'll often fudge damage rolls to put them on about -4 or -5 which gives the rest of the party time to stabilise them. If they do "die" I rule that rather than just being dead, their wounds have become "mortal" meaning that even magical healing is not enough to stave off death but they are not dead just yet. This gives them a chance to have last words with the party which has lead to some fantastic roleplaying moments and I think gives the player some closure for their character rather than the rather abrupt ending of *roll* crit, big damage, dead. I've had player's who loved their characters talk about how awesome their deaths were because of this and compliment each other on their last words using this kind of system which was a new experience for me after going through a couple of fairly anti-climactic squishings as a player.

If the player decides they want to keep playing the character then I do have the ressurection option available but like many people here I dislike the revolving door afterlife mechanics of high level DnD so I have the option available but rather than , spell cast, *bing* guess who's back?! it's a very big roleplaying deal in my campaigns. The caster, any members of the party involved and the character being raised are all summoned to the presence of a number of appropriate arbiters, planar beings that will judge wether or not the natural order may be turned about based on the character's answers. The LG paladin will be summoned before a being of pure law, an avatar or messenger of his God and a being of pure good. The neutral evil wizard and his party will be summoned before an aspect or messenger of his God, a being of pure evil and a being of perfect balance. The character and their party must then plead their case to the arbiters and get them to agree to relinquish his soul. Often their agreement includes some kind of price, such as a quest or pilgrimage on the material plane.