[larsdangly]

The way the flaws work in the Companion article is different, in an interesting way, from how advantages and disadvantages work in GURPS. Basically, you take on a lifetime quirk or disadvantage in exchange for getting to start play with 33-36 attribute points. Which sounds really helpful, except if you had been patient and lucky you would have gotten to that attribute total within a few adventures anyway, so pretty quickly your non-disadvantaged friends have caught up with you ... but you are still blind or have a peg leg or are a fall-down drunk or whatever. My players have't made use of these options, but I think they can work within a TFT campaign without being too disadvantaging.

One way you might game the system, if all you wanted to do was survive until you got to some high stat total before you started a life of more balanced adventuring, would be to start with a big disadvantage and 35-36 stat points, enter the arena as a Melee or Wizard contestant and use their accelerated advancement schedule to work yourself up to 40 or so, and then 'retire' to normal campaign play. Basically, this approach would be like re-enacting the first half hour of the original Conan the Barbarian movie before you launched your campaign.