At 08:05 AM 11/17/2016, David Michael Grouchy II wrote:
> it uses DISAVANTAGES (all caps in the original rules). Apparently I can not spell Disadvantages. =====
That's a -1 point quirk... ;-> Er, maybe a -0.01 point quirk.I agree with both Davids that there can be issues with gaining points from taking disadvantages. No points for fear of oceans, nor for low social status or albinism, when playing Death Test.
In practice I haven't found it to be a big problem because (as with almost all solutions from experienced GM's to many issues in many games) I look at characters and prevent people from making all sorts of inappropriate characters. With experienced/"good" players, they tend to take just a few reasonable disadvantages that are appropriate to the character concept.
But there are grey areas. The whole point buy system in GURPS (not just the disadvantages) can be seen to suffer from trying to balance apples & oranges in a generic universal way. With more and more rules added over the years, also watermelons and grapes and figs... and it breaks down as an accurate way to really evaluate and balance things. Also with the different detail levels and rule sets that can be played with, more detailed characters may cost more than more vague ones, which is an issue if you care about balancing points.
Also Disadvantages are just cool appropriate rules for interesting character traits, if you ignore the points.
My expert GM solution is to use points as little as possible, mainly for character generation, but also offering options for different types of characters which have different point guidelines. And then not using just points for character advancement, or much of anything else except vaguely limiting designs during creation, and as a rough measure of points for general balance of limited related things (like combat stats, or points into skills & spells).