Looking at some of the responses to a Looking for player post, and some comments in an OOC thread in a couple games I'm in, I came to a realization that there are people around here that don't come up with new character ideas tailored to the games they are applying to.  There are people that go and build characters fully, without a game to put them in, and then shop those characters around until they get accepted into a game.

I was wondering how common a practice this is.  Do you build characters blind to a game, or do you make new concepts based in the game you are applying to?