Grand Master crafter, all styles and all furnishing plans known pre U41.
Vamp and WW bites available for players.
Shoot me an in-game mail if you need anything, happy to help!
Of my 18 characters, I have only four races taken.
My main characters (1 of each class) are all Khajiits, because I like their aesthetics, but also their lore. Lucky me, they have passive that I love a lot: "Feline Ambush".
Then, for PvP, I created 1 character in the other 2 Alliances, 1 Orc and 1 Dunmer.
For the Orc, it’s the lore that won, but I don’t like its aesthetics very much. So, I hesitate to change its race or to remove the character.
The Dunmer imposed itself, the Nordiques being pretty ugly and I could not find my happiness when creating an Argonian.
Finally, all my mules are Imperial, for the passive "Diplomat", even if I have a doubt about their usefulness for writs. Nevertheless, I was able to find a nice aesthetic, so they are 10 clones.
For the most part, I create a character idea before I even decide to make the character. Those ideas build over time and then as new cosmetic items, classes and abilities are added to the game certain ideas become more or less viable. The ideas are then eventually dropped or used.
I've already long since created 1 main character for each of the 10 playable races, so it's not like I'm left wanting for once race or the other in terms of role-playing or gameplay.
As for the remaining 8 character slots, most went towards character ideas for races outside the bounds of the 10 playable ones--Dremora, Sea Elf, Golden Saint, Xivkyn, Goblin, etc. I used either a combination of certain playable races + cosmetics or just a full-on polymorph.
In the case of the polymorphs, I used whatever race I felt had the best passives for the build I wanted to run.
Aesthetics followed by passives. I choose a race that is at least decent for a role but still one I want to play. As a result I have a lot of khajiit dps and imperial tanks.
Lore and aesthetics are pretty equal to me but forced with a choice I'll pick lore. Which is why my NB is a redguard and I live in a state of constant suffering with the trash passives instead of just swapping to imperial or something.