In games with full party creation, every party member must be of different race and class, min-maxing be damned.
I am terrible at coming up with character names, so most of the time I default to one of the following methods:
-Random person from history or mythology. There doesn't have to be any sort of connection between the person and my character (for example, I wouldn't be above naming my elf wizard Genghis Khan).
-Lame pun of some sort. This tends to come up mostly in Pokemon, occasionally appears in other games.
-Something incredibly dumb and obvious, like Thiefy the thief or Spell Guy the wizard.
I try to advance as much as possible without resting.
In most cases I'm the anti-completionist, and I don't bother with content I don't enjoy or exploring every single cave. There are two major exceptions however:
-In the Infinity Engine games, once I've entered a map, it has to be fully explored until there is no fog of war. It has to be manual too - clairvoyance spell doesn't cut it. Skipping entire maps is fair game, though.
-In grid based blobbers, every square must be stepped on. If there is a trap, and it gets my party killed so I have to reload, the trap must be stepped on AGAIN because last time didn't count. If the trap is visible (like in M&M 3-5), I still must step on that square. Occasionally, if the consequences are too disastrous, I will allow myself to skip that particular square, but that one unexplored point will bother me until the end of the game.
If I get information from an NPC, die without saving and reload, I will go get that information again, even if no flags are being set and there is no in-game consequence to that particular dialogue, because my character still doesn't have that information.