Yeah, I was also thinking about Crusader Kings II as a kind of "pseudo-RPG." However, I'm not sure what elements of it would translate well into a traditional RPG. Something about shifting the player from one character to the next in a way that makes sense within the story and in the setting. There was a tabletop RPG many years ago called "Paranoia" which, iirc, involved the player-characters getting killed mercilessly, but reviving in the form of a clone. So you could get stuck in a trap or some kind of difficult situation and return with a "new" character. I once ran a Call of Cthulhu campaign - a challenging game in which characters died or went insane regularly - in which I allowed for the characters to leave journals, notes, books and newspaper clippings for their next character. A single plotline might involve a couple of "generations" of characters; one player had his new character, a newspaper journalist, interview his previous character, a university professor, in an insane asylum, thus picking up the trail and continuing the investigation. I think the newspaper reporter got eaten by a monster, so in a way, the first character outlived the second, albeit spending the rest of his life in an asylum.
