[quote=@One Who Tames]
I’ll not pretend to understand mentality of people who describe legacy characters as somehow flawed or those who play them as inferior.  To me, all that means is admitting an inability to adapt one’s own world view as well as the arrogance to declare anybody who disagrees with you as simply “wrong”.  I could go so far as to describe the practice of discarding one’s characters after only one use as shallow and lazy, but that would only be me being spiteful.

Legacy characters gain the benefit of being established and better developed than ones made up on-the-spot.  More love and heart can go into a creation that persists than a simple one-off who will be forgotten in a year but I digress.

The simple fact is that both one-offs and legacy characters have merit.  Any GM can tell you all about that.  Arbitrarily condemning one or the other is a sign of weakness on the part of he accuser.  However, preferring one or the other is simple opinion.  I enjoy a mix of the two as a GM and, in fact, find the “disposable” one-shots essential for the random NPCs that don’t really matter.  A few, even, have gone on to become fleshed out and beloved additions to the party.
[/quote]

But there is a difference between a legacy character and a re-used one to me.

'Legacy' implies just that- the character has a history. This would imply that, if I played a mecha pilot in one RP and this RP got to its conclusion- I would then bring this character into another mecha RP with all of the experiences of that previous one. It intrinsically links one to the other.

I simply don't agree with resetting a character to 0 and invalidating their past experience, unless they never had any experience to begin with. In the latter case they're a concept, not a character. Playing the same thing over and over is boring and pointless to me- the least you could do is give them a facelift.

It's like playing an already established character to me- why would you bother? Make something new, something fresh. Continue to experiment by writing something new. I recognize people will still re-use characters and I'm in no position to tell them they're wrong for it or should stop, but I don't see the merit in it on a personal level, not anymore. I've had only one 'persistent' set of characters from way back in my Tumblr days, and each of them never got reset. They carried every experience and (tried) to grow or change as a person from them.

The only time I'll do a reset to 0 is a literal reset to 0- with which I mean a reboot of the same idea. No reason not to give it another shot at that point, as the explicit purpose is to try the same thing again but different at that point.

I realise I completely shoot myself in the foot sometimes with this- I'll never be able to pull of Cyll, Yasu, Tamatsu and Kyogi again. But the thing is that those were tailor-made to the story that was trying to be told there and I couldn't just import them to another RP, because I might as well play a new character with how I would have to change them. That seems more interesting to me than forcing this square-shaped brick into a triangle-shaped hole. Sure, I could cut off an edge or plaster some stuff on it to make it fit the shape, but it's not really the same object by the end of it. Better off just grabbing a pyramid.