Are there any patterns you catch yourself falling into when creating new characters? Things like gender, physical/personality traits or things like birth dates/zodiac signs? Whether or not they keep pets, or the kinds of pets they keep. Any sort of thing, really.
Are there any kinds of traits that you intentionally incorporate into all characters? As an example (arguably a particularly odd one), I was once on a site with a player who would literally only play characters with a name that began with C.
So what are your patterns and quirks with character building? And, more importantly, is there any specific reason why?