I'm in agreement with Jig... once again. Jig, stop... stop reading my mind, man. 

It's honestly nice to encourage diversity and complementation between characters and their abilities/traits rather then have overlap, and reading character sheets obviously helps this out a lot. Personally I occassionally find it fun to sign up for an rp later then others and base my character and their sheets on aspects not covered by other applied characters so that my character could help accentuate those characters and offer conflict/complimentation to them. I agree with Jig in that I wish more people either did this or at least try to differentiate their characters more to existing characters within the rp other then create a character that is a duplicate in a lot of instances. 

Also, I'm actually a little bit stunned at Kestral's comment about sometimes not reading other peoples' character sheets. I mean, yeah, a lot of the time what goes into a person's character sheet ends up being different to what comes out within the IC, but I still find it a common courtesy to actually read what all other people have written, even with something like that. I mean, I'd like to hope they'd read mine.