Always struck me as odd that Raise Dead (or it's equivalent) were easier to locate than Regenerate (or it's equivalent) in various RPGs.

To be fair, Raise Dead basically requires the body to have all important bits intact and doesn't replace any missing pieces, so in that way it's doing less work than Regenerate.

Regenerate ends up the same spell level as Resurrection, which is the version that also fixes damage, but without a material component cost like bringing someone back to life.

The OSRPG tabletop game my group has been playing actually combines the two, sort of.

"Raise Dead" is replaced with a catchall spell called "Restore Life and Limb" which is capable of both returning someone who recently died back to life and regrowing missing body parts.

The trick is, any encounter with the Restore Life And Limb spell is potentially damaging to one's soul, and requires a roll against a certain table to determine if and how badly you've damaged yourself by Tampering With Mortality. That roll gets modified based on a lot of factors, most especially body condition (the more mangled you were, the harder it is to put things back together).

There IS a Regenerate spell that's much higher level and hard to come by, as well, which allows you to fix a lot of otherwise-permanent wounds without such risks, but if you don't have an extremely high-level mage of your own to cast it (in a game where mages are made out of tissue paper) you're not gonna have it available.

By any chance, would that be LotFP that you're referring to? Because it certainly sounds like something out of LotFP.

Now that we're several days in, it is time for me to mention some other ways I've seen this balanced out.

I say it all the time, I'm a GURPS fanboy. Not quite in the worst sense, but close; due to life passing me by so quickly, it has been about 20 years since I was part of a regular gaming group, and my attempts at finding or even starting such a group have failed miserably (and still been few and far between). In other words, take this with a huge grain of salt. In hindsight, while I used to think that the Standard Magic System for GURPS was far too lax in this department, I realize now that a lot of that was me and my friends failing to follow the rules. XP We were bad about material component requirements, sometimes we'd forget penalties clearly listed in the spell, other times PCs were just more than a little overpowered for the scenario (allowing them to "eat" those penalties), and probably the best way to allow high power healing as a safety net, but not putting the game on "Easy Mode": the best ones often had clauses like "You may only attempt to use this spell one a particular target once".

Lose your arm? Even if the party has a great healer in it, they get one shot to restore a crippled or lost limb or revive a fallen character. If the healer fails their roll, better hope the GM and rest of the party are down with finding another great healer to do the job. Even when such mages are as common as a good doctor, you may not have time! Now, the stipulations aren't as harsh as they might sound, either; I'm pretty sure that this is a "per injury/death" kind of restriction. Meaning, if you lose your arm/life again, there is still one shot per mage (with the appropriate spells) to try and fix it. Better hope you don't die right before a "boss" battle or other critical, time sensitive event. And having written it all out... I think these are actually pretty common restrictions, found in many games. Oh well. XP