Doctor Who/Torchwood

Hello all,
I have just joined this forum, and was pleased to see a link to the Doctor Who Miniatures Game :D . I edited the two rule books for Graeme. We now have a Yahoo group as well, with 80 members.

http://games.groups.yahoo.com/group/doctorwhominiaturesgame/

I am a big fan for Dr. Who and as I live in Swansea (South Wales), I have been to see them film - The Unquiet Dead, Smith and Jones :D .

I also had the two RPG's, the FASA version was a big pile of poo. They had different stats for the same characters in different books. and made up they own continuity :evil: .

The second RPG was a lot better, and I have been planing to run some games.

I was also one of the play-testers for Doctor Who - Invasion Earth done by Black Tree. A nice and simple system, but quite a lot of the points for some of the models was not correct :cry: .

It would be great to see a new Doctor Who RPG and a new range of models in the Shops.

Chris.
 
And BLUE! Don't forget it needs to be blue! :)

This sounds like something the MRQ OGL Core can, with work, do. a Universal expert character like the Doctor can have Science skills (the tech equivalent of Lore) at astonishing levels (300% or higher in specialties) but would be compelled to make some truly challenging rolls from time to time.

It would also be interesting to figure out how to model the adaptability of certain characters, such as Leela (who had never seen a gun in her life prior to encountering the Doctor, but has a very good idea of what to do with one once the concepts "point at foe, pull trigger, make foe fall down" have been properly explained).
 
Not sure about the use of UNIT with a BBC licence.
They recieved complaints from the real United Nations about the UNIT web site they set up for the Slithene story in season 1.and so may be touchy about their use in a product connected with the BBC.
Besides the Dr Who/Torchwood licence would be very exp£££££££££££££££££££££££££nsive at the moment due to it`s popularity
 
Torchwood part 2 DVD arrived today :D ....

Michael Hopcroft said:
It would also be interesting to figure out how to model the adaptability of certain characters, such as Leela (who had never seen a gun in her life prior to encountering the Doctor, but has a very good idea of what to do with one once the concepts "point at foe, pull trigger, make foe fall down" have been properly explained).
Click to expand...

I think a skill point/skill check/proficiency/force point/possibility/whatever in 'small arms' will cover that, or simply a high Dex/Reflex/Agility/whatever to use it well enough without proficiency.

Cheers
Mark
 
Whitehaven said:
Besides the Dr Who/Torchwood licence would be very exp£££££££££££££££££££££££££nsive at the moment due to it`s popularity
Click to expand...
True, very true. On the other hand, unless the Beeb are exceptionally stupid, they won't make things too expensive to license, otherwise they limit there own marketing oportunities.

Completely off-topic, watch this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GfNfDiqAF9Q
 
Eryx said:
Greg Smith said:
Travire, there have been two Doctor Who RPGs. The first one was by FASA. It suggested the existence of the 'Celestial Intervention Agency', a group of Timelords who actively sought out problems in time and space.
Click to expand...

The CIA (Celestial Intervention Agency) was mentioned in about two episodes of the series and appeared in several of the novels, and would (as you say) be the perfect platform for the game.
Click to expand...

Althogh one assumes that they were wiped out with the rest of the Timelords. If not sooner, given they were like to be on the front lines of the Time War. You could probably justify the odd survivor like the Doc, or possibly a "historic" setting.
 
Asuming that Mongoose can secure the rights to Dr Who as an RPG, I'd like it to be generic enough that it could be used at any time before the Time War or events that we don't yet know about in the future. It should also be compatible enough to allow Torchwood campaigns as well.
 
Eryx said:
Asuming that Mongoose can secure the rights to Dr Who as an RPG, I'd like it to be generic enough that it could be used at any time before the Time War or events that we don't yet know about in the future. It should also be compatible enough to allow Torchwood campaigns as well.
Click to expand...

Depsite its detractors, the Virgin RPG fits the criteria of being generic enough to recreate any Who time period and handle Torchwood/UNIT game scenarios (indeed, I just printed and bound a copy of it this afternoon with plans to use it for such a scenario).

That said, the organization is typical of non-RPG publishers trying to break into the market (i.e., it is horrible) and things relegated to the appendices (e.g., character creation rules) should be somewhere near the front of the book.

The dice system is very similar to that found in the Feng-Shui RPG and where both speed and function are concerned, is quite good. Where a plethora of options and mechanical crunch are concerned, it's a dismal failure. That said, if you like light games, it's great.
 
I did download Time Lord last night and had a read but I thought it was awful. Far too basic for my tastes, sadly.
 
Eryx said:
I did download Time Lord last night and had a read but I thought it was awful. Far too basic for my tastes, sadly.
Click to expand...

Well, one man's ceiling is another man's floor and all of that ;) Personally, I think that an option-heavy game focused on tabletop tactics would be a very poor fit for the rather high drama, story-centric, structure of Doctor Who and Torchwood. That said, I think that such a ruleset would do marvellous wonders for a UNIT campaign (indeed, I've considered using ASL to this end in the past).
 
I think that, if Mongoose was to publish a dr Who RPG, then it should be D20. Although I'm not usually a fan of D20, I do enjoy the Babylon 5 RPG & a Dr Who RPG using the same system would be "Fantastic!" :wink:
 
MGP's concentration on Runequest would seem to point to a Spacequest (or at least Modernquest) type approach. Not knowing the system at all (it was the one classic/original rpgs from the old days I never got round to playing).

Just finished watching the last episode of Torchwood last night. The series improved as it went along although I would have liked somwthing more to the 'there's a darkness approaching' teasers through the series. Looking forward to series 2. Haven't got Doctor Who series 3 (or should that be 30) over here yet.

Cheers
Mark
 
Oh, b*****ks, miscounted :( . Of course Survival was the end of Season 26. Series One is Season 27 but I just misremembered/counted. I'll cover myself by saying the US pilot was a one-part series.

Cheers
Mark
 
There's a Dr Who Unisystem Wiki in the works at the moment. The address escapes me but if you plug those 4 words into the search engine of your choice, it's there.

Cold City makes for an interesting Torchwood RPG. www.contestedground.co.uk - it's very rules-light but there's a beautiful Trust mechanic to represent how much each of the PCs trusts the others. Thought that fitted the Torchwood team pretty well since they all had their own agendas by the end of it. Not 100% sure it would work for a pure Who game...

Now I realise that I may be in the wrong place here but I'll stick my head over the parapet anyway and wait for the shooting to start. Please, not D20. Didn't like D20 Babylon 5 (though the fluff of the books is excellent, especially the season guides, the crunch just makes me think of D&D in space, and I'm not a fan of the new D&D at all). Absolutely hated D20 Farscape - that was an abomination and I think the poor sales showed more of us thinking that way. The Ubiquity system (www.exilegames.com) is pretty good, the Unisystem works very well and there's a lot of the monsters already statted up over in the All Flesh Must Be Eaten forums. But not D20. I don't know enough about the new Runequest but my experience is that an RPG originally made for fantasy gaming does not a good SF game make.

OK. Fire away!
 
I see what you're saying about Fantasy systems not working for Sci-fi, but Doctor Who is not a 'hard' sci-fi show and when it tries it loses it's appeal. The TARDIS certainly passes Clarke's Law and so a Fantasy approach might be appropriate.

Cheers
Mark
 
I know what you mean about "hard" SF - when they get it right it's all about the stories and the pseudoscience takes a back seat. If they dive too far down the science, it's never really worked.

Possibly my biggest problem with using D20 to run Doctor Who is my own preconceptions of the system. For me, if it's based on D&D, it's a "kill the monsters and take their stuff" system. My own beef with D20 is that it's way too complicated for what I need from a fantasy game. I don't need feats, powers, tons of "optional" rules that you're expected to go with and, above all, I don't need the heavy emphasis on miniatures. Not that I'd complain about a decent range of Dr Who minis!

What I'd love to see is something system-agnostic. Something that goes into the details of the setting, the races encountered and (like the B5 season books) has a synopsis of each episode coupled with adventure seeds and ideas. One book per season would allow the Torchwood universe to be kept separate from the more mainstream Dr Who universe (I know they're technically the same, and RTD is doing a better job with continuity than most would at this stage in the game <cough>Enterprise</cough>). But I realise that this wouldn't wash with someone just wanting to buy a Who RPG.

I just feel that D20 would be wrong. T20 (The D20 Traveller) didn't light my fire for the same reasons. Levels can't adequately describe the bredth and depth of a character's experience. They suggest that a Level 2 character is inherantly better at everything than a Level 1 character whereas in Who you'd get characters who may well be incredibly skilled in one thing but would still die if they were struck by a strong gust of wind. It's probably just me.

Think I'll try looking at a Ubiquity Who and see how that works. The system's very Pulp-y and that fits the feel of the current stories nicely.

Don't get me wrong - the company that produces the next Who RPG has my money, for the core book at least, so if Mongoose do a D20 one, I'll be buying. I'd just rather it wasn't D20.
 
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