Is a disadvantage really a disadvantage? It depends on how you look at
it.
In most point-based RPGs like GURPS or the Hero System,
things which are disadvantageous to the character have a negative
point value: in return for being scared of spiders or short-sighted,
you get more points to be awesome on other respects.
I see this historically as part of the general move away from an
adversarial GMing style of the late 1980s and early 1990s: the
player's reaction to that, to a GM who will remorselessly use any
lever to punish the character, is to build a character who is an egg,
all smooth surfaces and no handles. You can't put my Aunt May in
danger if I don't have an Aunt May. Once players have been thus
traumatised, it's hard to get them out of that mindset again, and so
the negative character point value of disadvantages serves as a bribe
to get them to make a character more interesting. (It's also a puzzle
for optimisers: how can I use the points gained from a disadvantage to
get some other ability which will allow me to make the disadvantage
irrelevant? But I diskard such people.)
I'd like to consider an alternative model. Every trait that goes on a
character sheet, positive or negative, is a way of demanding GM
attention and spotlight time. The positive ones are obvious: I am the
sword master or the genius lock-picker, I can solve this problem. But
the negative ones can work similarly: the team will fly to Algiers,
oh no it won't because I don't do planes so now we'll need to build a
new plan around me.
(Parenthetically, I gather that this was the genesis of the FATE
system: to describe traits neither as positive nor negative, but to
make them broader, so your "struggling space captain" trait can be
both positive (I know how to run a spaceship) and negative (debt
collectors are after me) depending on the situation.)
And this I think is why every game I've met that has disadvantages
like this has a limit to the total one can get. If my character
could have all the disadvantages and all the advantages, then in any
given situation they'd have some way of requesting special treatment.
Mathematically, if I have A points in advantageous traits and D points
in disadvantageous ones, GURPS says that A - D must be no greater
than the point budget; but it also caps D. Indeed I wonder whether
one might usefully put a cap on A + D, the amount of special
treatment that a character may demand.
- Posted by J Michael Cule at
04:08pm on
05 June 2026
I like the point buy system provided the GM knows enough to not let the players nerf any disadvantages and does not nerf them himself by not being interested enough to make the disads real. I wish I did not have so many examples of both faults in my memory.
I note that the disadvantage when de=numberised still exists in the DNA of many more recent systems. You can have these bits of good stuff but you have to take at least one of these complications alongw with it.
- Posted by RogerBW at
05:36pm on
05 June 2026
Optimisers put me off Champions back in the day, but now I'm simply not interested in playing with people like that. Everyone with whom I play GURPS is ferociously cooperative, and will happily help other players get the characters they want without trying to cheat the system.
I found Savage Worlds particularly irritating, in that it effectively turned the costs of all advantages and disadvantages into 1 or 2. Which is frankly a very blunt instrument.
One of the reasons I put up with the disadvantageous complexity of GURPS is that it lets me build characters who don't quite fit the campaign's archetypes, and whom I find great fun to play.
- Posted by ashley pollard at
10:46am on
06 June 2026
Ah, human beings; can't live with them, can't play games without them.
- Posted by John Dallman at
05:11pm on
06 June 2026
My approach to disadvantages nowadays is to find the ones that match with the way the character feels they should behave: Honesty, Sense of Duty, and things like that.
Those can impose other problems. I'm currently playing an intelligence agent who doesn't understand criminal thinking, and is only slowly realising that this is a problem.
- Posted by RogerBW at
03:51pm on
07 June 2026
I take a similar approach, but in that case we don't need to be bribed with more good stuff to take the bad stuff: we'd start off from the approach that this is a person like that (whose actions are restricted in some way, by mental blind spots or poverty or a sense of honour or whatever). (Because we know our GMs aren't out to mess us about but to set up situations in which all the players can have a good time.)
- Posted by RogerBW at
09:01pm on
14 June 2026
Thanks, but I don't Discord. If the information is somewhere that's actually public, I'd love to hear about it.
- Posted by Paul Blackwell at
07:11pm on
18 June 2026
To be picky, there is already a cap on A+D, which is the point budget plus twice the disadvantage limit. That doesn't mean one couldn't also have a tighter limit, of course; in a way it supports your wider argument, in that it shows that taking disadvantages of a given cost does in a sense give you twice the extra spotlight time. But it does mean that often there won't be a lot to gain from the extra constraint.
Having said that - and perhaps just to make explicit something that is implicit in your original post - the extent to which traits in GURPS translate into spotlight time varies a lot. That's more so in 4e, now that every (non-quirk) negative trait counts as a disadvantage, even slightly below-average (sub-)attributes. If you have IQ12, taking Will 11 is officially a Disadvantage, but doesn't get you any more spotlight time, except indirectly by paying for Per 13. And some Advantages do contain both benefits and drawbacks.
"Everyone with whom I play GURPS is ferociously cooperative..." I'll happily take that, but equally happily note that "cooperatively ferocious" also applies, at least to the characters, when appropriate.
- Posted by RogerBW at
09:23am on
19 June 2026
Indeed, I was mostly wondering whether rephrasing the constraints more or less as you suggest might make it clearer that disadvantages aren't just a way of paying for the fun stuff.
(One of the main reasons I stick with GURPS generally is the disadvantages: they're a handy way to build an interesting personality different from mine.)
Ultimately of course points aren't at all consistent in their worth anyway. If character A has all the blasting powers and character B is rich and well-connected, which one is more effective will depend hugely on the nature of the campaign: not tech level or whatever, simply how the GM feels about the relative effectiveness of those techniques and what sort of game they want to run.
(All right, I did briefly play a Corax (were-raven) in a GURPS Werewolf game who had almost no powers but was on good terms with basically everybody, which was remarkably effective.)
Ferocious when needed, yes, but often bending over backwards to avoid violence as long as any other option seems viable. I like that.