The Doctor Who
Role-Playing Game

Game Review

reviewed by Greg (Where did I leave my Tardis?) Maples

Designed by Wm. John Wheeler, Michael P. Bledsoe, L. Ross Babcock, and Guy W. McLimore, Jr.
FASA Corporation P.O. Box 6930, Chicago, IL 60680
Released: May, 1985
Catalog No. 9001 Price: $15.00
Complexity: Intermediate
Solitaire Suitability: None
***

The Doctor Who Role-Playing Game is a licensed game based upon the adventures of Doctor Who, hero of the BBC science fiction television series from the early sixties. Since that series started, Dr. Who has gone on to become an immense cult favorite, with fans in both the new and old worlds.

The Doctor Who Role-Playing Game consists of three soft sided books: the Game Operations Manual, A Sourcebook For Field Agents, The Players Manual, and two six-sided dice. The game is supplied in a semi-sturdy box featuring horrible cover art. I have been told that BBC did not approve the cover art and FASA Corp. is reissuing the game with a different cover. if you come across a copy of the game sporting a cover picture of Dr. Who and Leela walking through mist past a cosmic donut, you might have a collector's item on your hands.

The graphic presentation and page layout muddle the reader; it would seem that the graphic artist got carried away with lines, boxes, etc. The order and format of the presentation of material is also unsatisfactory. The prospective referee will face lots of confusion when searching for a rule because of this poor organization. The only saving feature to this organization is that the books are well indexed in the Table Of Contents.

Once the reader begins a study of the rules, these petty problems should fade away. The most significant positive impression the game conveyed was that the designers did not lecture the reader and tried hard to involve the reader in the milieu of Dr. "o. The writers chose to present the rules as if they were not lecturing, but teaching, and the reader should find this engaging.

Characters have six attributes, Strength, Endurance, Dexterity, Charisma, Mentality, and Intuition. These attributes range from I to 30, with 6 to 10 being an average human score. The two possible races for player characters are human and Gallifreyan (Time Lord). Every character has a special ability such as Blending, Enhanced

Dexterity, Healing, or Luck. All characters start with attribute scores of six, and have 36 points with which to alter these scores. The player rolls 2d6 to add a luck factor. This means that the average character would have average statistics of 13.

All attributes, skills, and tasks in Dr. Who are measured in levels from one to seven. An average character would have six attributes, three attributes at level four (average), and three at level five (professional). Next, a character gets skill points with which to buy skills, based upon attribute points. Purchasing a level of a skill requires a certain expenditure of points, from 1 to 28. The character also gets bonuses when buying skills related to attributes.

Up to this point, the designers of Dr. Who allowed players to design their character. Then, the player is told to roll dice for personality traits, appearance, and age. Thus, the player can roll up a character described as an indecisive, fat, plain, midget who is 50 years old. So much for the thought of designing a character to fit an idea. Since these traits are not needed to generate other information, I suggest the player scrap this section entirely, and use his own ideas instead.

The average character takes about 25 hits to kill. The average weapon in Dr. Who does between 1 and 24 (4 six-sided dice) of damage. Thus, unlike most role-playing games, the average character in Dr. Who can be fully fatigued and incapable of action with one shot from a powerful weapon. As any Dr Who aficionado can tell you, there was very little combat in the Dr. Who series, but most of it was deadly. I hope the decisiveness of combat in Dr. Who acts as an inducement to players and referees to role-play and not wargame.

Here however, we come to one of the most important flaws in the design of the Dr. Who game. If your human character is killed, you roll up another one. If your character is a Time Lord, however, you can reincarnate. This is a bonus for Gallifreyans. There is no inducement to ever run a human.

My personal view of role-playing tells me that a good player would run a character based upon conception, not on survivability, but a good design would have managed to make humans just as attractive as a Time Lord. Reincarnation makes a nice answer to the question of why there were so many different Doctors in the television series.

As a prospective player progresses through the rules, he will discover this bias towards Time Lords is accentuated, not diminished. A Time Lord is the only character that can operate a Tardis (the time and space warping transport booth), and only a Time Lord can safely visit Gallifrey, home of the Time Lords (others are treated as escaped pets, slaves, or criminals). While it is laudable for designers to keep Gallifreyans' reincarnation in balance with the series but humans are more limited than in the series.

All in all, the game is backed by acceptable writing, that tries hard to get the player and referee into the right frame of mind. This effort is backed by scads of Dr Who trivia, lots of monsters, color, and gadgets; however all this effort is wasted on the mechanics. The FASA Corp.'s mechanics are clumsy poorly implemented, and not weil thought out. The referee and player can overcome the FASA Corp's mechanics as evidenced by poor organization, confusing graphics, and lack of balance, but it requires an effort.

Dr. Who is a fun milieu with fast action, lots of pseudo-science, icky monsters, and entire worlds in distress. The game is a decent attempt to mimic that feeling and is acceptable for that reason only.

More Role-Game Reviews

Back to Table of Contents -- Game News #11
To Game News List of Issues
To MagWeb Master Magazine List
© Copyright 1986 by Dana Lombardy.
This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web.
Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com