Rules System for Doctor Who

[Chainsaw Hobbit]

Purely out of curiosity, what roleplaying system do you think would best suit the Doctor Who universe?

I think it would need to be more story-focused than simulation-focused. It also shouldn't have too much of an emphasis on combat. Perhaps FATE. Or some sort of Apocalypse World derivative.

I am aware that there is a Doctor Who roleplaying game. I haven't read or played it, but based on what I've heard, I'm not a fan. It doesn't sound like it fits the faerie tale logic of the show.

[Ninjadeadbeard]

I'm not exactly the most informed person on the subject, but have you considered Mutants and Masterminds? Point-buy with virtually limitless customization, loads of powers and abilities, and with so little fluff it's more like a book full of numbers.

It's awesome. Doctor Who...despite involving absolutely ludicrous amounts of whimsy and universe-spanning shenanigans, is probably a low level M&M game, due to the...well, Death. I mean, I've always heard that under Fifth there were pretty much no survivors most days unless you were a historical figure or the Doctor himself...and even then...

PL6 or lower perhaps. If you play companions or normals. Time Lords and Daleks are...special cases. Definitely PL10+.

[mjlush]

I am aware that there is a Doctor Who roleplaying game. I haven't read or played it, but based on what I've heard, I'm not a fan. It doesn't sound like it fits the faerie tale logic of the show.

Which Dr Who RPG? I was not a fan of the 1985 FASA one, I played Time Lord (available as free pdf) and thought it OK, I have Doctor Who Adventures in Time and Space and thought it really good, fast simple and well fitted to the setting.

In my travels I found http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/ianmcdonald/who-rpg/ "Who-RPG
The Original List & Site about Dr. Who Roleplaying Games"

[NichG]

The usual problem that crops up when people try for a Dr. Who RPG is the asymmetry between the Doctor and his Companions. If you just wanted to run something in the Dr. Who universe without the Doctor being part of the party, you could use a lot of things. There are some things which you'd probably want to try to stay true to though:

- Most of the threats are of the 'if it successfully hits you, you die' type, so a Vitality/Wounds system like Star Wars d20 has, or a system with a lot of avoidance but very few wound levels like in White Wolf's Adventure (well, generally speaking at least) would be best.

- The inclusiveness of the Dr. Who universe is a big element. There are really very few unbreakable physical laws in that series, and there's always some new alien that does weird things that look like other weird things. That means that a system with dramatic editing where the players can specify random factoids as they like fits very nicely. If someone wants the Kaltharaxians to be vulnerable to lipids in common milk, why not!

- While its pretty clear that the companions get smarter, more skilled, and more experienced as the seasons progress, the scaling is nowhere near the kind of thing you see in D&D; it also doesn't really feel like the kind of thing where you'd spontaneously develop new powers all the time. There'd be a lot more focus on skills and the process of learning new skills as one encounters the weird out there.

Based on all of that, what about the Cortex system (the one underlying the Serenity RPG and Supernatural RPG)? It has a sort of fate point mechanic that you could use and most of the improvement has to do with getting better at skills rather than something D&D-like with feats, class abilities, etc.

Now, if you want to somehow have the Doctor in the mix, then things get a lot more complex. I'd actually say the best way to do it would be to make the Doctor an NPC that is under committee control by the players. Basically, something like whenever the players discuss OOC what to do, the OOC consensus becomes whatever the Doctor suggests or insists or whatever. By giving their good ideas to the Doctor NPC, they can refresh fate points or action points or whatever. By spending such points through the Doctor, they can pay for the cost of a dramatic edit collectively - e.g. if it costs 4 points to give the Kaltharaxians lipid vulnerability, four players could each toss one in, but then the Doctor NPC is the one who announces 'ah, heres the solution!'. If a player wants to do something outside the OOC consensus, their character can of course still do so but is then running on their own resources (perhaps doing this grants bonus xp or something? I dunno...)

[Asmodai]

I have to say that Doctor Who: Adventures in Time and Space is a brilliant RPG that totally gets what Doctor Who is about. The system rewards roleplaying, has a method to award and accomplish player influence on the plot, makes combat something that really should be avoided (in the finest Doctor Who sense) and is presented in a lovely package.

Otherwise, I'd just go and FATE it.

[Dienekes]

Heh, I once thought I'd run a Dr Who campaign, until I actually started to think about how the game would go, and that the Doctor is basically the worst DMPC since Gandalf, and since I truly despise DMPCs I quickly dropped the concept

Anyway, I was planning on using PL4 Mutants and Masterminds as suggested earlier, with the companions rather rapidly gaining power points, but they could not ever reach past PL5 or 6 levels, so they just get more competent but can't do anything super heroic.

[CarpeGuitarrem]

FATE is actually a brilliant choice. Most episodes consist of the Doctor and companions making Create Advantage rolls (using the Fate Core terminology here) to build up free taggable assets, so that the Doctor can make one grand sweeping roll at the end, tag all of the assets, and do the impossible. Alternately, you could model the solution to the problem as a ritual (from the Dresden RPG, based on FATE).

The only other idea I have, ironically, is Hollowpoint; you just reskin all of the skills into non-lethal approaches.

Another interesting idea I saw was a game (A Strange Charm) which cast the players as various concepts (Love, Victory, Defeat, Shadow) who trade control over the Doctor and companions.

[mjlush]

Heh, I once thought I'd run a Dr Who campaign, until I actually started to think about how the game would go, and that the Doctor is basically the worst DMPC since Gandalf, and since I truly despise DMPCs I quickly dropped the concept

If you use the earlier more doddery Doctors (1 2 and more or less 3) it works quite well with the Doctor as a PC the companions are there to do the action adventure stuff and Doctor is a more (grand)father figure.

[dps]

It's awesome. Doctor Who...despite involving absolutely ludicrous amounts of whimsy and universe-spanning shenanigans, is probably a low level M&M game, due to the...well, Death. I mean, I've always heard that under Fifth there were pretty much no survivors most days unless you were a historical figure or the Doctor himself...and even then...

Yeah, being an actual historical figure won't necessarily protect you in an episode of Doctor Who; just ask Madame de Pompadour or the Clantons.

If you use the earlier more doddery Doctors (1 2 and more or less 3) it works quite well with the Doctor as a PC the companions are there to do the action adventure stuff and Doctor is a more (grand)father figure.

Well, One and Two, certainly, but Three is probably the best Doctor when it comes to actual physical combat. Even with the younger, more physically fit versions of the Doctor, though, direct physical confrontation isn't really his style. Even in terms of intellect, some of the companions have been more or less a match for him, and some of the ones who certainly weren't as smart as he is are sometimes more insightful or focused (the Doctor, for all his smarts, is sometimes all too easily distracted--I don't know how you would stat that in an RPG, though you can certainly RP it).

The real advantage the Doctor has over his companions is when it comes to the topic Ninjadeadbeard brought up--Death. Death isn't cheap in the Whoniverse for most people, but the Doctor can cheat it by regenerating. Of course, if you let his companions be Time Lords, too, that gets around the problem.

[Ninjadeadbeard]

Yeah, being an actual historical figure won't necessarily protect you in an episode of Doctor Who; just ask Madame de Pompadour or the Clantons.

Hence the "and even then". Whoniverse is dangerous!

The real advantage the Doctor has over his companions is when it comes to the topic Ninjadeadbeard brought up--Death. Death isn't cheap in the Whoniverse for most people, but the Doctor can cheat it by regenerating. Of course, if you let his companions be Time Lords, too, that gets around the problem.

Or one could be a robot (The Centurion), or a robot dog. Having a bunch of Time Lords as PCs seems like it'd get unwieldy unless the GM was very creative in how (s)he could limit the players. Like, a campaign where a number of minor Time Lords get exiled to a particular time period, or sent on specific missions.

The alternative is for the players to work as Torchwood or UNIT personnel...but then I suppose Call of Cthulhu would be a more appropriate system. Hell, the Daleks even look li-

Spoiler

Show

Oh god...

[mjlush]

The real advantage the Doctor has over his companions is when it comes to the topic Ninjadeadbeard brought up--Death. Death isn't cheap in the Whoniverse for most people, but the Doctor can cheat it by regenerating. Of course, if you let his companions be Time Lords, too, that gets around the problem.

For all the deadlyness of the Whoniverse, of 29ish companions only one has died. The Doctor has a far far higher 'deathrate'. Contact with the Doctor seems to give some people a huge boost to their survival chances. A boost that lasts long after departing his company. Captain Jack made it through the Torchwood. Sarah Jane has been able to extend the blessing to to her teenage helpers. Edit:Ian and Barbara have not aged since their return in 1965

There is a peculiar "protected by the genre" aspect to Dr Who. If you act like a 'proper' sensible bunch of adventurers you should get a TPK in short order... However if you wander off without telling anyone, sniff strange flowers, talk to strange people, fall into obvious traps etc bad things will happen but the PC death rate should be extraordinarily low.

Anyway when the Doctor regenerates he is doing what everyone else does rolls up a new character and unlike some people who play a series of 'clone characters', he even has the decency to change the personality.

[Waspinator]

You need to be able to get skill bonuses by giving extremely convoluted explanations for things.

[Scots Dragon]

For all the deadlyness of the Whoniverse, of 29ish companions only one has died.

Not in the way I'm counting it. In order (italics are reversed deaths, or borderline examples);

Sara Kingdom (murdered by Daleks)
Katarina (ejected into space)
Romana (regenerated)
Adric (died on a crashing space ship)
Kamelion (killed by the Master's tissue compression eliminator)
Grace Holloway (killed by the Master, resurrected by the TARDIS)
Chang Lee (killed by the Master, resurrected by the TARDIS)
Jack Harkness (killed by Daleks, resurrected by Rose as an immortal)
Astrid Peth (killed by explosive decompression)
Adelaide Brooke (committed suicide to restore part of the timeline)
River Song (killed in the Library, appears later due to time travel)
Rory Williams (killed and erased, brought back by universal retcon)
Amy Pond (died of old age after incident with the Weeping Angels)
Rory Williams (died, again, of old age after incident with the Weeping Angels)
Clara Oswald ('the twice-dead girl')

Keeping it to only the companions who've died permanently, that's eight so far, and that's just within the television series itself.

[Scots Dragon]

EDIT:
To return to the topic at hand, there was actually a freely available and genuinely damn good Doctor Who roleplaying game released in the nineties called Time Lord, which had a simple and straightforward system and a vaguely interesting sense of character creation and development. It's based mostly off of the older series, covering William Hartnell through to Sylvester McCoy and including most if not all of the companions and major villains, with an expansion that includes the characters and events from the 1996 TV Movie and thus adding the Eighth Doctor.

It is available from here and here. The former link also has a fan-made supplement called Time Lord: Journeys which had a lot of useful things like a revised and expanded character creation system.

[Hopeless]

I ran such a game under d6 space but the doctor was strictly an npc character and even then I used a clone based on that hand he lost in the Christmas Invasion.

I'd second Cortex as a good option actually bought the cubicle seven game version but gave it to a friend whose a David Tennant fan so never really got into it but then had the same problem with the One Ring so I'd suggest you try the system you're most familiar with since that would be the easiest option to try and run a doctor who game if you're the gm.