[quote=@Shohmyoh]The first part would be for a player to publicly post the more obvious attributes of their character, namely what one would notice about them at first glance, or how they would be viewed by someone who didn't know them.  For the second part, the player would PM me the more in-depth facets of the character's personality and backstory.  I was thinking that keeping the nuances and more complex components of the characters hidden from the OOC thread would force the players to organically reveal and discover them as the RP progresses.  This would hopefully help the characters come into their own and keep them divorced from their creators, make them feel more like real people that you learn more and more about rather than a pre-made mannequin that the player is acting through.[/quote]

This has definitely been done and definitely works and I completely endorse this for a secretive game. My own game runs on this system and, because we're a tight-knit group, I can trust my players not to leak info. I simply asked players for pictures, presented the pictures and first names to the group in-public, and when they all met for the first time, suggested they state in OoC any objective, observable features like expressions and accents. That was all the players had to work on going in.

One thing I used was a Canon Cut-off. That was, any and all facets of that character could be considered important to their being or likely to come up were to be PM'd to me before the player's first post. Until then, they had as long as they wanted to tweak and discuss their character with me, but, from their first post, the information was locked down and unchangeable. They didn't know what their characters would be faced with when they made them, and were obliged to stick with it.

[quote=@Shohmyoh]The reason I got interested in the idea to begin with was figuring out a way to maximize the consequences of character death, and I think allowing a player only one character, emphasizing interaction and growth, and stacking the odds against their survival would cultivate a sense of loss if they fail.  Making a character's death feel like a punch in the gut is what I'm going for, frankly.[/quote]

I don't know enough about your game's content, but, if a player was to create more than one character and one died, you could perhaps have the corpse turn up later in a particularly brutal, Saw-esque fashion. I think if I were to see one of my creations who was taken from me turn up later, dismembered and degraded, that would be rather cutting - but, if I had another character, at least I would still be able to enjoy the game.