hoskope: I always wanted to play this series and it has been on my library long time. However, today i installed it and checked the character creation very briefly. What's with the thing you roll your stats, but it seems you can edit the points after that? What i'm missing? It felt like i can add everything to 20 and still it seemed that i could click done-button?
bismuthdrummer: This originates from the pen & paper world of D&D, where you could modify stats after rolling (subtract 2, add 1 to customize at penalty for example). So many variations exist that the simplest implementation is just let the player edit after rolling. You also get the added bonus of being able to enter in a character you play in paper.
There may also have been explicit conditions set out for development in licensing the game with TSR, which would explain for the ubiquity of this feature. Who knows? Someone out there does.
Yeah, this feature had its origins back during the 2nd Ed AD&D era, I believe, when the popularity of the Dragonlance and Forgotten Realms novels saw a renewed surge in interest in D&D from players who wanted to live out the War of the Lance or Drizzt's flight from the Underdark for themselves. Accordingly, many published adventures actually provided the stats of the novel heroes themselves, and I presume this habit carried over into the Gold Box era of D&D games from players who wanted to modify their stats to a specific character ("Raistlin goes to Dark Sun!") to adventure with.
