[Tom H.]

Yeah, Eddie, it can be kind of a rabbit hole, so don't feel bad if it's time consuming.

One of the problems with the massive list of advantages in the Basic Set is that there are many themed sets of advantages with strong connections among each other, but they are all just listed alphabetically.

Unfortunately there isn't much in the way of official guides to relating advantages together for a desired outcome (unless you need to take your designs to the level of GURPS Powers, probably not needed for Dog Men). You basically discover these connections from the ground up by cross-referencing the entries in the Basic Set as you peruse them.

So surprisingly, there are a lot of GURPS "rules" hiding among the advantages. For example, there are combat rules for brittle or combustible bodies masquerading as the Fragile disadvantage.

Building characters with all these rules is pretty clever, but sometimes it can be a bit overkill if the end result of compounding say 4 advantages is just tweaking a score or two by a point or two.

In the end, what really matters is how the character will interface and behave in the world. That interface is limited to a smaller number of statistics and success rolls.

For the "lighter" Dungeon Fantasy, the recommendation is to even build monsters without character points, just focusing on some relevant scores.

Even here it helps to know some of your advantages. They act as a shared vocabulary to describe specific effects.