@Medix2 oh cool, yes but it would have to also be paid for. And pay for the stowage of the corpse, for all the time thereby held in wait.

Can you please clarify what the purpose of the question is? What are you going for? "Realistic" pricing? Do you just want raise dead to be particularly expensive? For "realism" this would require details from your campaign settings to answer (how common is magic of this level? How much gold is available to individuals in general, or rich people in particular)? If you just want this to feel some degree of "punishing" for your players you'll have to figure out how much wealth they have access to and work backwards from there.

@Cubic i would like it to be independent from knowledge of the players resources. Realistic in the sense of that a fee market should develop from demand of a scarce resource, spell-craft. Generic high fantasy setting or forgotten realms - i would leave it up to the answerer to make an argument as to relative wealth if necessary. The cost of procuring resurrection could arguably provide an upper bound on the price of raise dead.

Voting to close, this seems like an idea generation question to me.

@ThomasMarkov how do you find this idea generation? . It is a well bounded question - price of a service in a game where there are services and prices.

This isn't a service accounted for by the game, though. This is a complication (market scarcity) that you've brought in from IRL. By RAW the answer is either 'you find a caster, and Raise Dead has this component costing X gp' or 'you don't find a caster', without middle ground.

I would argue that the DMG provides a rarity attribute and correspondent pricing to the tiers of magic items and rules advisements for determining prices in the DMG and various supplements. It would then be great to have a definitive answer from an expert DM as to how they considerer RAW in such aspects or how they have experience doing otherwise. Your comment is indicative of a partial answer speculating that no-other persons expertise or familiarity of the rules could be greater than yours.

There you go, then. You've just answered your own question.

@StopBeingEvil Not yet, but stack exchange does encourage people to answer their own question. I will consider it after 24 hours.

I'm not sure this can be answered without a full understanding of your world's economy. The factors of pricing are enormous, and unless we have those details, this will just be generating ideas without foundation of the specific economics of your world, the region, the town, and the caster. Voting to close as opinion-based, but this could likely be better discussed on a forum or our very own Role-playing Games Chat.

IIRC there are actually rules somewhere that specifically cover paying for spellcasting services. I forget exactly where though.

Related on How much should NPCs charge for spells cast as services to PCs

@NautArch - That is not the only way the question can be answered, a GM could have support from experience or reference to Xanathars guide, for instance scribing a 5th level spell scroll is $5000 and 4 weeks of work, perhaps the cost to pay off the person in line is to commission the creation of a spell scroll and to cast 'gentle repose'. I do not assume to know ahead of time how clever the participants of this Stack are.

I voted to re-open on account that it is not opinion based, as there are many rules to help inform pricing in the DMG, Xanathars guide and other supplements which can lead to a quality answer.

I also think there is sufficient material in the rules to give a good answer that doesn't stray into idea generation. However, @AmethystWizard perhaps you could edit your question to make it more clear that you are looking for existing guidance from the rules regarding spell pricing rather than arbitrary ideas?

This also seems like it may be a duplicate of this question, could you explain why the rules and guidance mentioned there isn’t applicable here?

So the main issue with this is that in a void, genuinely any answer seems basically valid. "The vendor is already at capacity and can't sell." "The vendor is at capacity, so extracts an absolute fortune from the players." You've set up this situation and there's clearly a context to which you'd be presenting this problem to your players, but it's that context and the effect you want to get out of it we'd need to understand to give this a well-informed subjective answer instead of pure opinion on what the merchant could/should do.

@doppelgreener if the answer were simple - I presumably would get the reverse criticism - 'read the rules'. The context is intentionally limited - so the answer would be broadly useful - to the common case that a service provider would have prior business to attend to and a rush service thusly may have a correspondent toll.

Of the potential answers you provided, I can already nullify the first one in that the cleric' service is voluntary, so they can sell. The second answer is more nuanced, the 'absolute fortune' is limited by the price of the alternative - which is the spell resurrection that does not have a time delay - but requires a more experienced caster. This presents an upper bound to the price - so the question is answerable in a limited scope. Also adventurers are known to be very fortunate, so how much of that fortune is necessary to procure the service? We know it's not less than the material cost.

If there is anything to be workshopped meta seems like the place. I voted to leave closed for three different reason, either needs more details, or is a duplicate, or is opinion-based. In its current state the question is all over the place. -from review.

I voted to re-open because the question clearly addresses a very common RPG scenario; the DM has to give a price to players for a service. It appears most people are fine with using the 'cost of goods sold' method of accounting which is to measure the direct cost, but that is insufficient to account for a fee market (demand).

@AmethystWizard I think Akixkisu has a pretty level take there. These comments are getting quite long, I highly recommend taking this to meta for workshopping. There might be a stackable question here, but we’re gonna need some more discussion to get there, and I don’t think comments can serve that purpose anymore.

“The context is intentionally limited - so the answer would be broadly useful - to the common case that a service provider would have [...]” Please focus on your exact concrete case you're dealing with. Going broad and leaving out details isn't helpful because it means we provide a worse answer. When you provide specific details from a concrete context we are able to provide concrete high-detail answers that are more useful for having that detail. You can extrapolate from there or ask specific follow-ups.

So, I just firstly want to drop a note that part of the comments here get messy, because while things starts bordering on answering, they didn't seem to do so usefully or to an end other than demonstrating the ambiguity of the question

Also, just so it's clear, the comment use here was generally ok, it just got long (and I've tried to to keep the important stuff still in the comments as part of the move).

As for the question it self, Imma do a shameless plug of: rpg.meta.stackexchange.com/q/9344/52137. It really seems to apply here, because I'm not sure "should" and "fair" have enough stated goals around them to be answerable.

What are the goals (yours and the cleric) in this?

As written it is much to much of a (quite good) discussion starter, because there's a lot of interesting ideas that can be explored around the situation you've described

I'll also encourage that you include what guidance you're aware of in the question itself. Otherwise answers will be wasted on telling you things you already know

@AmethystWizard ... the author can cast repoen votes on their own closed questions? That seems off...

@StopBeingEvil The privilege to do so is earned at 250 rep. It's very much intentional

Huh, learn something new every day

Hmm yeah, it could turn into a multi- question question. Trying to answer it myself i come up with a few more questions- “how much does a wizard earn in a day?” Because then you can determine a base rate - if they were to give up a day of leisure to cast your spell - then you have a hurdle rate to bid over to gain the casters favour.

Why would the Cleric ask for extra money and not a quest? How aligned are the Divine towards capitalism?

And i wonder how far in advance a caster would have a full schedule / waitlist.

@Someone_Evil yes a quest would be good, to procure more components

@AmethystWizard Or "I can push your friend ahead in the queue if you promise to go cleanse X old temple for my god"

Also I think related: