Are quirks officially counted as disadvantages?

[Bruno]

Originally Posted by Ze'Manel Cunha

I've been running GURPS for over 20 years now and I've never had a player submit more disads than they wanted to roleplay, in fact, outside of genres like Supers and such, I have a hard time getting players to take more than 30 points worth of disads.

Good for you, because you've had sensible players. Sensible is a different axis of measurement from "munchkin" by the way.

I've got players that are too creative for their own good. I don't doubt their ability to track 180 points in disadvantages and make sure to punish themselves with them on a session-by-session basis (or even more frequently) - and one of them I'm not sure he could spend that bonus 180 points in a munchkinny way to save his life.

He would be inadvertently scene stealing, however, by needing to be carried around by the other PCs. Or he would get abandoned and basically dropped from the game by the other PCs, or he'd be more handicapped by them than the campaign premise was really set up to accommodate. Either way, someone - either the player with 180 points in disads, the other players, or the GM is going to have a headache. Which isn't fun, and that is kind of the point of gaming.

Some genres just don't have room for characters with tons of disadvantages on a recurring basis, and I mean this even when the character doesn't get ANY points back for them. Net point value is a side issue that distracts in these conversations.

Most kinds of military, all special ops short of special ops comedy, super spy agent, many modes of "Genre fantasy" (but certainly not all!)... all of these tend to get deformed or outright self-destruct by the addition of a character with a high disadvantage burden - mostly because characters with big disads, strongly penalized attributes, or a huge pile of little disads are damned unlikely to have got themselves into the situation in the first place, and may be unable to pull their own weight to get themselves out of it.

I put a disad limit on my games like I put any other character creation guideline (including total point value!) - it's a soft limit, intended as a framework for the players so they don't spin out of control or get side-tracked from the concept everyone agreed to. Disadvantage limits don't replace the GM reviewing their character sheets any more than saying "No spells" replaces reviewing the character sheets, it's instead meant to filter out the really bad ideas that were generated mostly because the player didn't focus. Putting limits in character creation means you TRUST your players to actually follow them. Adversarial GM/Player relationships quickly lead to players ignoring or ruleslawyering their way around limits - co-operative relationships thrive on staying within the agreed upon limits as an artistic challenge.

Disad limits (along with all the OTHER guidelines I set when putting together a campaign) are a bit like spam filters for my players really bad ideas. If they come up with something that they feel needs to be Cursed and Blind, and they actually want to play rather than sort of threw together on a whim, I feel pretty confident that any of my players would approach me and say "I know you said maximum -50 points, but I think this is really cool, and I think I can make this work without ******* everyone else off." I'm not going to burn his character sheet just because I set a 50 point limit. Same thing, if I'm starting a 150 point game, and someone wants to play a 50 point (or a 250 point) character enough to actually ask me about the possibility, I'm not going to reject him out of hand. But saying "We'll be playing an 150 point game" means that I don't get the player sort of randomly submitting a 50 point or 250 point character because he sort of built one by accident.

I understand that your players don't do that. But I have to point out, I'm not GMing for your players.