Kill your favorite character

I was meditating on "letting things go" this morning, and somehow my mind ventured to Untold, and specifically how delightfully impermanent any character is. I'm not sure I can accurately express where my mind went, but here goes.

"Death" in most RPGs is something to be avoided. You've spent hours rolling dice, arranging skills, purchasing equipment and selecting abilities. (Some people even spend time developing a character history, but that's not necessary.) And then you play the character for weeks or months (or years), gaining experience and treasures and greater power.

And if your character dies, then it all goes away.

You can retire to the next room and start rolling more numbers, while the game world moves on without you. Or maybe somehow your character can be magically pulled back into play. But it's not a quick process.

But with Untold, you don't have a character sheet that acquires text like a riverbed gathers sediment, so at some point you'd have to dig through several layers to see where you were many adventures ago. The cards are a poor substitute for the character sheet, and that's a good thing. In other games, the character sheet is your character, and defines (or limits) their actions and choices. Conversely, the cards in Untold are more like dots in a child's coloring book: they help guide the picture but you have to do the work of describing why the powers are together. Suddenly, the story isn't, "I gained another level so my monk's unarmed damage went up a die." The story becomes, "My character is tired of being used as a punching bag by every undead we encounter, so I'm raising his Body to 4 with this latest UP." And the story is more fluid than that, since those changes can be unwound and shifted to other powers your character can manifest in the story you are telling.

So let your favorite Untold character die. Wander away from the main table for five minutes. Pull out new cards (or even a significant chunk of the old ones). Total the UP and sit back down. Tell everyone the three most important facts about the newest inhabitant of this shared imagination. Then game on. The actors can fade, but the story continues unabated.