Knowing When To Reroll

Not even I played this old of a version

In the extremely old-school D&D, your six base attributes were determined by rolling 3d6 and recording that number. You went from top to bottom just filling in what you rolled. Whoops, rolled at 4 for Dexterity? Congrats, you are playing a nearly-handicapped level of clumsy character, perhaps you actually have a neuromuscular condition!

You picked your class afterwards, based on what you could do with your stats (this was the mechanism for limiting Paladins and other powerful classes in the world - the chance to roll that many high stats were extremely low). You wrote your backstory afterwards, to describe the character you rolled up. Part of the game was being given a random person and playing the role of that person in a medieval world. How do you play a wise, very nimble, but very sickly cleric? That’s part the game you signed up for.¹

Sometimes, however, the rolls are just too bad. Too many abysmal stats, and no good ones. A player looks over the character sheet and knows that no matter how they play it won’t be much fun and the character will die soon anyway. So they jump into role-play immediately, before the session even begins.

“Georg The Unfortunate, in a moment of clarity that breaks through his addled brain-fog, realizes that he simply sucks too much to live. He’ll never amount to anything and he’ll always be miserable and it would just be best if he’d never been born. In a fit of despair or perhaps mercy he kills himself.”

Once the character is dead the player is allowed to roll up a new character. Since this is a bit grisly, after one or two such incidences it’s shortened to “I reroll.”

In my late teens I was in a lot of psychological pain, and very depressed. I sometimes thought about rerolling myself. I was miserably and it sucked too much to live and if this was what life was, it wasn’t worth it. Maybe I had just been extremely unlucky in character creation when my genes were semi-randomly decided and it would be best to cut this short so as to not waste more time on what would be an ultimately suffering-full endeavor. Leave the adventuring in the real world to people with better stats.

I’m very glad I didn’t, my life got better once it actually started, and it has been so net-positive that those days are but a smudge of black on a room-sized portrait of the sun. Good job sticking it out, teen-Eneasz. :)

But stats aren’t constant throughout life. I’m getting older, and some of my stats are starting to degrade. They’ll continue to do so relentlessly forever (or until we solve aging). The shining positive experiences will be harder to come by soon. In the not-too-distant future negative experiences will start to come more often, and with more intensity. There will come a time when my median day will have net-negative joy. The ledger of my life will get slightly less bright in expectation for every day I continue.

I probably won’t want to reroll immediately. I’ll tank a lot of hard days to get to some good ones. But eventually, when my stats get low enough, I feel like it just won’t be worth it. It’ll be too much bad. I don’t want to bring the net-joy of my entire life down to below the break-even point. I want to bail out earlier than that, when it was still a great net-positive experience.

I don’t know if I’ll have the courage to reroll when it’s optimal. But, once I’m sure that point has definitely passed… I really hope that I do. Leave the timeline less cluttered so people better equipped to place joy-jewels within it can do so.

Hopefully it won’t come for a long time yet.²

1. I never played this hardcore version myself. Even at my earliest it was roll 4d6 (sum the three highest results) and then distribute those results as you wished among the six stats. But I heard the stories from the Elronds of our group, the ones that were there 3,000 years ago.

2. Or, even better, hopefully we’ll unravel this whole aging knot and it’ll never come at all. :)