Thomas Shey
Legend
Snarf, I think this is one we might want to check the fanzines on at some point, because I guarantee that people were experimenting with variant score generation methods prior to seeing them officially presented in 1979.
I certainly remember 4D6 pitch lowest as a methodology discussed somewhere during my early gaming career, and I was out of D&D by '79, so it was either discussed in the context of houserules earlier, or I'm remembering it from Gamma World or some such.
In this Gary quote he says "players would keep rolling until they got more viable numbers" and he attributes that to "when AD&D made stats more meaningful", but of course we know that Greyhawk made stats more meaningful in 1975, two years before the PH came out. So I strongly suspect he was misremembering the timing on that.
You'd think.