Another week, another zillion distractions....

Another week ticks by, containing two Runequest sessions and an abortive attempt at playing Cthulhu. Plus I'm firing up the Nephilim engines yet again. I live in hope. At any rate, the Game WISH of the week has to do with reusing characters:
Do you ever reuse characters from game to game? When you reuse characters, what do you bring from game to game: a name and a personality, stats, or more? What kinds of characters do you reuse and why? If you GM, do you like to have players bring in existing characters? Why?

When I GM, I'm usually opposed to reusing characters. It seems to me that the desire to do so is often motivated by laziness (and come on, it's not like making a Cthulhu character is a major time commitment) or a power play--old character has cool objects and skillz that the player doesn't want to give up. I like a fresh start. One of my players used to give me a hard time that she was not allowed to run characters from the Southside Cthulhu campaign in the Northside Campaign as well... But my feeling is, if the character gets killed (a likely possibility, given the nature of the game!) then this screws up the timeline etc. of the other campaign. Plus I just don't want to fool with, ok, the southside gang is playing in 1923, but the northsiders are in 1926... Messy. Easier and better to just make new fodder--er, characters.
When I play, the question seldom comes up; we play so many different systems in my group that we each just have one character per system, at the ready. But I don't think I would, anyway--I love making new characters. While I wouldn't say I never reuse a concept or a personality trait, just importing a character lock, stock, and barrel from game #1 to game #2 is unappealing.

Now, all that being said, I am VERY fond of using PC's from one game as NPC's in another! Several of the Breakout characters have turned up in the Dreamlands portion of my Cthulhu campaign, most notably Paul Volker and October the cat....