>>242
Building on that, I could imagine some kind of persistent-world roguelike.
If you die, you get to loot your old character's corpse if you find it. Fairly standard.
But if you get to a good spot like archmage or shopkeeper, you could abandon that character without dying and visit them in subsequent playthroughs in order to learn spells or buy items (you might need to somehow set them up to farm resources over time to make that happen). You'd be building up a civilisation, one NPC (or rather, ex-PC) at a time.