Character Pitches: Before or After

I'll be brief, as it's late and I'm headed for a con in the morning.

Together, 100%. In fact, I'll often go last / wait to see what others are building to either fill gaps, play off, or connect to the other concepts.

Really, it depends on the game. Some games on here, I just blindly accept players before seeing character concepts. Others, I want to see concepts and choose from among them. But sometimes, you only get three or four people interested in the game, and you take what you can get.

I think for me, pitches before are helpful when you have an unfleshed-out idea for a game and want to see what others think of it. World-building with players is a great way to do it, and the concepts they have for characters is often part world-building. For instance, you have a character who's afraid of wolves. Why? Do huge packs run rampant through the countryside? Are they intelligent enough to get past defenses? Is it just one really old wolf that hunts them so they have to be wary of all of them?

BUT, if the game is already fleshed out (modules are a good example of this) then the question isn't what the character tells me about the world, but why does this character want to be part of this story, and since ANY answer to that (outside of murderhoboing) is acceptable, I don't need your pitch ahead of time. You're an adult, make your character want to be here, or at least be forces to be here in a way that induces cooperation. And if you can't do that, you failed your pitch, not your character.