I usually go first playthrough based of my personal decisions. If the game feels unresponsive or hardwired to certain outcomes (Knight of the old Republic 1 with having to deal with Bastila as love interest for example) I might bend to it, but usually its a sign that I don't like.
If the game has some solid room for roleplay (like DAO had) I might do multiple playthroughs with different approaches and proper characters in mind. I did the same with Dragon Age overall where I only played the first game based on my own decisions and the other two I had specific characters in mind.
I definitely don't like playing pre-generated and pre-defined characters and I usually skip those games. Witcher has been here an examption because its based of a book character, whose motivations align close to mine.
I don't care about build optimization. I go with my vision for a character based of what I enjoy doing. If a game is well balanced and has a fun gameplay (so far not my experience with Larian games) I might play on the highest difficulty as well - but still not worrying about the optimization (mastering a game is a skill that I simply have no interest in, life has more rewarding challenges than that).
And no, my characters are not based of my attributes because I'm not an adventurer/hero in real life.
