Over the course of my winter break between semesters, I've been going back and putting on a movie while I do work- something which either doesn't require a lot of brainpower or is something I've seen before. In this case, the film was a rewatch of The Prestige. While chock full of readily game-able material, one specific element of the plot jumped out at me for non-conventional usage. As a without-context spoiler, the film features a teleportation device straight out of a philosophical problem: the device creates a perfect duplicate at a different destination while destroying the original. This of course raises questions regarding the continuation of consciousness and other existentialist weights which would be great to throw at players.
The only problem is doing so lacks a certain weight to it. Just describing to a player "your character is dead, you are now playing a perfect copy of your character" is something which'd probably be quickly overlooked; unless accompanied by some doppelganger fight or sanity mechanic, which even then may feel a bit forced. After a bit of stewing though, I defaulted to coming at it with a design principle offered up by Arnold Kemp of Goblin Punch: "attacking every part of the character sheet." While almost always a useful principle, the only issue in application here is that by it's nature this shouldn't affect a character sheet at all. For the weight and feeling of this to land, the character should be completely unchanged aside from their potentially duplicate nature. That's when it hit me to take the principle literally.
I've never had a GM rip up a character sheet in my face- and personally I find the idea in it's usual context often rude- but such an act has weight to it. People grow attached to certain characters of theirs, and to a certain extent they grow attached to the sheets of those characters as well- to the point where they hold on to ratty old sheets without replacing them or they retire a dead character's sheet and hold onto it as a memento. So it'd be fair to say this action, ripping up the actual sheet the character is written on and replacing it with an exact duplicate, has impact while ultimately having no effect on the game beyond the description that comes with it and having a new piece of paper. It does something despite doing nothing.
Well... it may do something. This may be more another neat idea and less a useful tool in practice, as admittedly this idea does come with a lot of caveats and baggage which may make it have a lot less mileage. If your games involve turning over character sheets a lot more often or your players aren't the sentimental type, then it'll probably be neat but not phase them much. Not to mention that the whole sort of "act" probably requires a bit of theatrics and a lot of preparation, including quickly replacing player's character sheets after turning them into confetti. You'd also probably have to have duplicates ready by your own hand, as having players copy them down would save on effort but deflate this down to being a big tax and waste of everybody's time.
