Haha. Wow, I don't know. I picked IWD up as soon as it came out.. spent a good hour or two pouring over possible party configurations on paper, finally settling on a team of four. Settling into the character creation screen, I began my work.. rolling, and rolling, and rolling.. of course I didn't have the patience to sit there there and do it all at once; I would keep the game minimized, every so often pulling it back up and spending an hour or two at a time rolling for decent stats.

Finally, FINALLY.. three days after the game came out, just this morning, I had all four of my characters set up with acceptable stats. Excitement, time to play! Right? Right? Err.. nope. As soon as the intro paragraph was done scrolling, the game crashes to the desktop.

Honestly, I don't even think I have it in me to play this now.

Just venting! At the least I have this silly thread to show for it all. :p Hope you guys are all having more fun than I got to.

I didn't take nearly that long to roll, but I guess I didn't go for perfect stats, more like "good enough" so that I could max out the most important attributes to each class. I understand the frustration though, I still probably spent close to an hour building up my party.

Was it a one time crash, or does it happen every time you try to start a new game? If it was just a one time deal, and you remember the stats you rolled, you can always restart the game with junk stats, then use DaleKeeper to change them to the stats you spent days rolling.

The save game editor DaleKeeper can be found here:
http://www.mud-master.com/dalekeeper/index.html

I hadn't tried it again, but I did just now and it made it into the game fine. I don't remember what I rolled for each character, unfortunately. Thanks for the suggestion though. =)

doesn't the game make a character file for each character as you create them? (I really don't know, don't get your hopes up, but it would be a shame if in a few weeks you discover those characters sitting there, ready to be imported again).

I am 99% positive that the game doesn't save the character file unless you manually export the character. This means you must start the game first, since you don't have the option to export, except from the character profile screen. For a game like this, where rolling characters can be so time-consuming, I believe it is a fairly large design flaw.

When I made my party a few days ago, I would just start a game with every individual character, then export. I think you can actually create characters from within the game (in the Formation screen), but I didn't remember this when I was making my party. So, I just created a new game for every character, then created my final game and imported all the characters.

And there you have it, *the* tip to avoid unfortunate situations like the OP described. Thanks!
But yeah, design flaw indeed..