Roman Republic Games were community-based challenges, where multiple players all play the same character (or set of characters) with some common objective. The goal was to reach some objective, such as winning the game.
Classic[]
The concept was first envisioned by Silfir [1], who wanted a game where victory or defeat was determined by an entire community of players.
In a classic Roman Republic Game, each player would play the shared PC for a fixed period of turns (typically around 2000), before the savegame is transferred to the next player. Death of the PC, in these cases, typically results in a death for all players, and means that the group must reroll from scratch.
The first successful Roman Republic challenge was completed by the PC Rhea, the grey elven merchant (reports, char dumps), who successfully closed the gate after approximately 41 sets of 2000 turn rounds distributed over around 10 players. Numerous other Roman Republic characters following this format have been attempted, with more limited success.
Spinoffs[]
Roman Republic games inspired multiple spinoffs. In competitive games, such as The Weakest Link, players don't have to be cooperative. A player dying results in the player being eliminated, with the next player trying from the same PC. All such games typically are played over a period of several weeks to allow for varying schedules between players.
Similar challenges include the more recent Mission ADOMPossible challenge[2], which featured teams of 5 players with 5 characters attempting to complete various missions (eg. dive through the Unremarkable Dungeon, acquire the Fire Orb, etc.) and receiving points for their team for each completed mission. Players would swap characters upon completion of their mission. If a player died, that player and their PC would be eliminated from play, and the remaining members of the team would continue on without their assistance.
This format was designed to try to allow newer players more opportunity to participate--classes were distributed according to a list of preferences by each team captain, so each team ended up with several classes of relatively easy difficulty that could be given to less experienced players, whereas more difficult classes could be taken by more experienced players.