Cubicle 7 Introduces Dr Who rpg License

[Hopeless]

So anyone care to discuss the announcement at Dragonmeet this Saturday of Cubicle 7 gaining the license to produce a Doctor Who RPG?

Anyone?

[Fhaolan]

I'm a big fan of Dr. Who, and I have played the various RPG versions that have come out over the years.

None of them have been that great from my perspective. While it may be possible to capture the flavor and feeling of a specific episode, it's very difficult to get the feel of the entire series. The abilities of the protagonists and antagonists vary too much from one episode to another based on the story needs. Time travel just makes things worse, as it makes the disparity even more apparent.

Also Dr. Who series is really written around the hyper-competent Doctor, and one to three companions of varying competence. The more companions, the more specialized they are to keep the same level of overall competence relative to the Doctor.

These are all things that can be handled by a highly skilled Game Master, but GMs of that skill are rare, and usually are already running this kind of game in a different system (like GURPs or RIFTs).

In other words, I think this game will be another one in the line of Doctor Who RPGs that will end up on collector’s shelves (mine included), but won’t actually take off past the initial release and a few follow on suppliments.

[DeathQuaker]

It's hard to comment when there isn't a whole lot of information out on it yet. I'd like to see what they've come up with, of course, and yeah, it's likely to be something collected by Doctor Who fans even if it doesn't get played a lot.

The Whoniverse is pretty huge and there are a lot of ways to make a good RPG out of it... however, the problem is the temptation to make an RPG that revolves around the Doctor. The Doctor is a single, very powerful hero... if you make him a PC, you have one player who has way more mojo than everyone else, which isn't fair to everyone else, balance wise. If you make him an NPC, it's still a balancing act not to make him the "star" when in the RPG it's the players who need to take center stage. It's all too tempting to a weak GM to make the Doctor deus-ex-machina everything while the players stand around and drool.

So the challenge would be pitching a Whoniverse game... and
1. Offering good, solid suggestions and scenarios for people who want to use the Doctor in their games

2. Making sure there are also a lot of guidelines and scenarios for Doctorless stories.

"Torchwood" actually makes a great RPG concept more than "Doctor Who" because it's about a team of investigators, and the Torchwood canon includes the fact that TV's Cardiff team is only one of four Torchwood cells. Create a new Torchwood cell starring only the PCs and off you go.

Likewise, for similar reasons (but with more of a military/action theme than a sneaky investigative theme) a UNIT-based RPG would be fun.

Of course, if you called the RPG "Torchwood" or "UNIT" fewer people would buy it, but I can only hope they offered rules and fluff for running those kind of games, because that's where it's going to be easiest to create a situation conducive to playing through in an RPG style.