BG1 is the only game I wouldn't bother playing without stats well above average -- thankfully.

This brought back memories, from I think it was either Baldar's Gate or NWN and I spent at least two hours rerolling just to get 18 strength stat:)

I give myself a limit on rolls. I'll do something between 10-100 rolls and store/use the best roll from them.

8 hours?! After 8 hours you should have just considered that winning the game and quit. ;)

Except that most RPGs take longer than that on a casual playthrough.

About the only RPGs that I can think of that are shorter are SaGa 1 (Final Fantasy Legend 1) and Costume Quest, neither of which involves rolling stats. (SaGa 1 has one race with random stat growth (well, as random as the game's poor "RNG" allows), but that doesn't apply at character creation, and there's no mechanic that plays the role of a level cap,)

Edit: Actually, I could probably add the remakes of the original Dragon Quest to the list, bug again there's no rolling for stats.

Isn't the answer rather simply "when ever you like"? This are still just games after all.

I've recently play around 20 hours of Daggerfall using the Unity engine port. I knew that the Luck skill is never used in the game, so at character creation I lowered it to 10, and then I rerolled until I could could get 80 in Strength and agility(which affect dmg and dodge/hit rate) and 50 in all others.

Of course, I ended up in a no win situation, when it turned out that there is a disease(maybe there are more) in the game that slowly drains luck, and once you reach 0 luck you die. I hadn't bought a "cure disease" potion/spell and I couldn't sleep until morning when the temples/spell shops opened without dying.

Strangely, searching around walkthroughs, I couldn't find any documented disease that affects luck, so this might be an addition by the Unity port devs.

As a general rule, I find out if there are any "dump skill", I lower them to the minimum and then I re-roll until I'm comfortable I'll be able to maximize my other skills by the middle/end of the game.

18 was easy, 18/00 was hard :D

Simple. Note down the max value in each of the stats, write a script to reroll and read the result until everything is maxed, then stop. Make a cup of tea while it's working.

That assumes that it's possible to get a roll where everything is maxed out. The developers could have made it so that there's a cap on the character's stat sum, so a perfect roll would be intentionally impossible. Or, perhaps the game's RNG isn't perfect, and it just is not capable of generating the sequence of numbers that would lead to perfect stats, resulting in the perfect roll being unintentionally impossible. A variation on that last point would be if the RNG can generate the max stat sequence, but the number of random numbers used and the period of the RNG share a common factor, and the RNG just happens to not have the right alignment to generate the perfect roll.

In other words, your approach is not guaranteed to terminate.

(Before you ask, there's no way to reliably predict that it will terminate; otherwise we'd have a solution to the halting problem.)

Wasn't there an item that you ended up wearing anyway, that gave you +1 str? So you could actually use any 18/90-18/99 roll to ultimately get 18/00.

Yes, you are correct and that made you 19/00 which was a lot better but you needed the 18/00 first.

Not in Baldur's Gate 1. But you could read a tome to get to 19 :). Or read the same tome many times to get to 25. Alas I had to nearly finish the game first until I figured it out.

Before you even start re-rolling lol

Yes, an an easier version to do the same would be: "edit the save file" (or even "edit the value in memory while in chargen", if stats decide what you get when initally starting the game) using an application that likely already exists. But OCRing the screen to read a value is also fun.