[larsdangly]

That's certainly true (and might even be consistent with the intent of those old articles; they aren't very clear on that point). But given the constraints on stat increases in Legacy Edition, this would make high-value disadvantages almost required for any PC. That might be kind of fun, but would distort the playing field quite a bit and I suspect people would quickly tire of it.

This is related to one of the things that turned me away from GURPS and back to TFT: the integrated 'economy' of stats, skills, advantages and disadvantages in GURPS basically force you to take maximum quirks and disadvantages, and steer you towards choosing a subset of disadvantages that let you harvest the points without suffering substantial consequences. I greatly prefer the way ITL has always worked, where you have a fixed economy of stat points, and then your choices of those constrain your economy of talents, spells, etc. I.e., you can't 'trade' talent choices off against stats (not directly anyway). If you could, the same kind of gamesmanship would take hold in TFT.

One suggestion I might make is that you could introduce an element of randomness by having people roll on a table of disadvantages (and perhaps a similar set of advantages) to give you some random chance of starting play with these various unusual qualities. You might even give some rare chance of a super power (also in the Companion) if that is the kind of campaign you want to run! Then you could compensate or penalize the PC's starting stat total and/or rise through experience so that the range of character abilities doesn't explode. Or not; anyone who has played old-school Gamma World knows that wildly variable PC power is fine.