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Comment by thom | Hacker News Reader

The original idle RPG was sitting on a character creation screen re-rolling your stats for hours if not days on end. I'm pretty sure I played the character creation bit of MegaTraveller more than the actual game.

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Did dicerolls in character creation exist in any game outside of Traveller? I vaguely remember a possibility of dying before the first game session. And character ability generally growing with age, so you'd either play a seasoned veteran or a young but clueless rookie. Not surprising at all that the game always struggled, very surprising that it made it through so many iterations nonetheless. (mine was TNE, but never really had a group)

I will admit I only played the computer game, but yes you could die one of several ways, in action, of old age or sometimes having risky surgery to fix an injury. Obviously games from the D&D lineage had similar, but were largely limited to just trying to get the biggest stats possible. The Elder Scrolls series let you choose a class based on a series of life experiences but that was optional and not quite as rich.

I think when you play with veterans that do not care about their personal power, but about the story itself, traveler can be great fun.

It's a core part of the early editions of D&D: Roll 3d6 for each stat. Or maybe 4d6 and drop the lowest. What class/species would those numbers work best with? Make up or randomly roll more details.

Traveller was infamous for the ability to have your character die before starting the game, but pretty much every early RPG followed D&D's lead in generating a character's basic stats, and possibly more details, with dice.

infinity engine games - baldurs gate, torment, icewind dale

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