Because I'm sure to piss someone off by saying it, I'll prepend the caveat that I'm not making any value judgements about anyone else's RP. This is just me.
That said, I never understood the "This character is the same one I played in Tera/Wow/Eve Online/Minecraft/Tetris" thing, and so I've never done it. I adore learning about the lore of a world, so I love making fresh characters that wholly inhabit it. For alts, I sometimes use elements of old characters (for instance, Meleia in EQ2 was a Freeport Chekist and spy for the Overlord; Gehmor in Star Trek Online was a Cardassian trained as an intelligence officer before the fall of Cardassia; Armistead Moreau is a Duskwight who lived in a large Clan and was employed as a spy before the Calamity devastated them), but that's about it. Names, cultures, backgrounds, etc, all get created whole cloth.
That said, I never understood the "This character is the same one I played in Tera/Wow/Eve Online/Minecraft/Tetris" thing, and so I've never done it. I adore learning about the lore of a world, so I love making fresh characters that wholly inhabit it. For alts, I sometimes use elements of old characters (for instance, Meleia in EQ2 was a Freeport Chekist and spy for the Overlord; Gehmor in Star Trek Online was a Cardassian trained as an intelligence officer before the fall of Cardassia; Armistead Moreau is a Duskwight who lived in a large Clan and was employed as a spy before the Calamity devastated them), but that's about it. Names, cultures, backgrounds, etc, all get created whole cloth.
