The Inside Scoop on Gaming

Forward:

Doctor Who was one of the few games I couldn't find in RPG.net's review archive, and not only that, but there are two separate games. The Doctor Who Role Playing Game was released by FASA in 1984 while Time Lord was published by arrangement with BBC Books as a TV tie-in/game in 1991. (Makes you wonder if the BBC ever released a Coronation Street RPG…) This review will cover the first game released by FASA. Time Lord will be followed in a second review and will include information on using the two together.

The Doctor Who Role Playing Game

Released in 1984, this classic boxed set is now very hard to come by. In brief, for those who have missed the Doctor Who phenomenon, the game is based on the British television show of the same name that premiered in black and white in 1963 and ran until about 1990. It continues to remain a cult hit to this day. Fans remain hopeful that it will one day return to television or the big screen.

Doctor Who was one of the first role-playing games to make time travel its primary focus, and do it well mostly, because the game draws on the strengths of three decades of episode history. The premise of both the show and the game is intriguing and daring: A race of near-immortal and scientifically advanced beings called Time Lords have the power to travel backwards in time. Our time, 21st Century earth, exists far in the past of the Time Lords, whose present day exists over 28,000 years into our future. Out of all the races in the universe, we humans are somehow crucial to the fabric of history and we tend to attract a lot of attention. In general, the Time Lords resist the temptation to tamper with the past, leaving the universe and humanity to fend for itself. The Doctor, an eccentric renegade by accident more than design, has long been hunted by his fellow Time Lords for meddling in affairs not meant to be meddled in even though it's always for the greater good. Add a malfunctioning TARDIS that catapults the Doctor and any accidental tourists that he collects into new and dangerous frontiers across time and space, and you have a setting that's almost perfect for a role-playing campaign.

In The Box:

The box showcases the most popular of the series' stars, the impossibly long-scarfed 4th Doctor (Jelly Babies anyone?) and his leather-clad barbarian companion Leela (the only Companion who didn't scream at everything). Inside are three books:

The Players Manual – the absolute minimum basics of the game, The Game Operations Manual – intended for GMs, this has some duplicate sections which detail important, game-mechanic information left out of the Player's Guide as well as comprehensive how-to-Who Gamemaster advice, and The Sourcebook for Field Agents – all the other information that's vital to creating a Doctor Who campaign.

In a tactile sense, these books are neat. The covers have a creased leather feel to them, even though they are regular paper and the design has a Victorian flavor that fits the style and flourish of Doctor Who. The books are set with three columns and include lots of black and white photographs from the series as well as stylized artwork that ranges from good to bad. The components listing in the Players Manual doesn't tell you how many dice come with the game (though my foggy memory insists that some did) or how many are required to play. Judging by the rest of the book, you'll want about a fistful of six-siders for each player to keep everyone happy and rolling.

The structure of the game doesn't lend itself well to a book-by-book review because there is information that is either a) duplicated in the books or b) of vital importance to the players yet resides only in the Game Operations Manual. So instead the review is broken down into Character Generation, Game Mechanics & Gamemaster Material.

Character Creation

After the obligatory introduction to role-playing essay in the Player's Manual, readers are launched into character creation. Kind of. The three sections that describe the process are, to put it mildly, weird and include Defining A Character, Tabby Cats and Time Lords, and Creating Player Characters. Elements that define what a character is and what they can do, specifically their attributes, special abilities, skills, personality, appearance and background, are physically separated from the mechanics of how they work in the game. You can, for example, read about the special ability Enhanced Endurance in the Defining chapter, find out how you get it in the Creating chapter, and find out how it affects character creation in the Game Operations Manual. Between the character creation chapters is a piece of game fiction, Tabby Cats and Time Lords. The story is a flavor-piece designed to coax new players through character creation and to give an idea of what an adventure (minus game mechanics) might be like. As events happen in the story, new players are urged to go to the appropriate section in character creation, then jump back to the story. Why this was set between two critical chapters is beyond me. My preference would have been to have the story first, followed by the "laundry list" of the steps of character generation and the detailed information.

As far as character creation goes, you'll need a lot of scrap paper alongside your sheet and you may want to read the chapters a few times before going ahead. You pick your species and your sex; the book assumes that you will be either a Gallifreyan Time Lord or a human from one of Earth's time periods. While several of the Doctor's companions came from other planets, they have all been essentially human. For something more exotic, the Gamemaster will have to improvise. Next, it's attribute scores, which are: Strength, Endurance, Dexterity, Charisma, Mentality, and Intuition. Attributes are rated in two ways: one with a point value or cost and one with a level value, called Performance Levels. These levels, ranked by roman numerals, run from Level I (Handicapped) to Level VII (Mastery). Everyone starts out with 6 points (Level III – Basic) in each attribute. Players roll 2d6 and add that to a bank of 36 points they can then use to allot to their attributes. Why not have each player start with a bank of 72+2d6 points? I don't know. Next, roll 3d6 and consult a table to determine your Special Ability. There are only a few abilities, but the options range from nothing (on the high point of the bell curve) to the drastic Telepathy or Telekinesis (on the far ends). This seems both unbalancing and needless. A few combat-related numbers are generated next, based on your Endurance, and then it's on to skills.

Skills are ranked with the same Performance Levels scale as attributes. The book directs you to total up all the point values of your attributes to get your base bank of points to buy skills with. Now, throw it out. After telling you to total the numbers, the book then tells you that four of the attributes, Strength, Dexterity, Charisma and Mentality, all afford bonuses to skill purchase, depending on their level, for skills that fall under their domain. IE, if you have Level VI (Expert) for Mentality, each of those 21 Mentality points will be worth 6 points when you buy Mentality-affiliated skills such as engineering, gaming, or streetwise. So, get out your scrap paper, figure out the bonus conversions, and start buying skills. Once that's done, it's on to the last little touches. Don't count on playing an attractive, sleek barbarian who has a short fuse just yet, even if you've paid all the points to do just that. You have to roll a variety of d6 combinations to determine your Personality Trait, your Appearance, your Age, and your Apparent Age. A nasty roll combination can earn you a Fat, Short, Homely, Squeamish 18-year-old that looks like an Old Adult – too bad if you had the tough barbarian or anything else in mind. Only Gallifreyans that will have Real Age and Apparent Age discrepancies due to the Time Lords regeneration ability that necessitate the rule. My recommendation; toss this last bit right out, especially considering that age has no bearing on the amount of skill points you spend, even though that is counter-intuitive. The remaining character traits have no real impact on game play, so they are easily ignored if desired. I am guessing this system was put in place to reflect the nature of the series; Doctor Who was populated with "ordinary people", not supermodels. If you do want to roll random, though, do this part FIRST and then go back and buy your attributes and skills to reflect the rolls.

In short, character generation is terrible and confusing – a system that takes the worst aspects of random rolling and point allocation and fuses them together. Thankfully, the more you do it, the easier and faster it gets.

Game Mechanics

There are two types of rolls used to resolve an in-game challenge, the Saving Roll and the Skill Roll. They are essentially the same but are based on the character's attribute or skill level respectively. A given Task will be assigned a difficulty level on the same I to VII scale. Modifiers, either positive or negative, are applied to both the Ability (either Attribute or Skill) and the Task. Once the totals are known, they are looked up on the Interaction Matrix table, which is a downright huge 25 by 25 table, almost as impressive as DC Heroes original main resolution table. When you plug in both the Task and the Ability value, you get a Target Number. Once you have the Target number, you roll 2d6 – if you roll lower, you succeed, if you roll higher, you fail. Rolls that are either five lower or five higher than the target number are either special successes or spectacular failures. For some reason, the Interaction Matrix table isn't included in the Players Manual, only the Game Operations Manual, which I found annoying.

Before you roll, you have to add and subtract your modifiers. They come in two varieties. The Gamemaster assigns the first kind off the cuff and based on the situation at hand when it's not a combat situation (like a verbal conflict). The modifiers can quickly become impractical if every little advantage or disadvantage is taken into account, creating a laundry list of pluses and minuses until you arrive at your Target number. The second kind of modifier is generated from combat situations and include things like line of sight, concealment, movement modifiers from both sides, aiming, range, and size. Combat is very detailed and requires mapping out action scenes with graph paper, ironic considering the show's general lack of "shoot 'em!" style combat. When combat does come into play, the character's Action Points (APs), derived by taking your point total for Dexterity and dividing it by 3, determine how many things you can do in a ten second Turn, the unit of time for action sequences. If only players are involved in the scene, they can decided for themselves who will go first or go in order based on Dexterity, from highest to lowest. If there is a mixed bag of player characters and non-player characters, turns swap from side to side in Dexterity order. However, if someone on either side has the skill Small Unit Tactics (or has the higher skill level) that side will always go first in the turn exchange and they will be able to choose any character to be the one to act, regardless of skill or Dexterity level. Players and the Gamemaster can also choose to save some of their APs for opportunity actions, such as hiding or shooting, which are taken in response to the actions of others. While I can personally appreciate this approach, my mind boggles at how complicated a series of combat turns would become. With combat, comes injury, the last major game mechanic. There are two kinds of damage: Maximum Operating Damage (Max Op End) and Current Operating Damage (Curr Op End). The former reflects wound damage, the kind that can kill you and which will reduce your Curr Op End level and takes longer to heal, while the latter reflects temporary damage from non-lethal damage like a stun gun, drugs or fatigue, which can often be healed with rest. The rates of healing for both kinds of damage depend on current conditions of the character and the character’s Wound Heal and Fatigue Heal levels. Damage in Doctor Who is both serious and potentially deadly which, I feel, better reflects the spirit of Doctor Who than the game’s detailed combat rules. Many of the game’s core mechanics are elaborated upon in the Game Operations Manual, a book meant only for the Gamemaster. While there are some elements that should be shielded from the player’s eyes, specifically things such as the species listings, there is a great deal of material from character creation and combat that are only fully explained in the latter half of this book. It makes it harder for the player to understand the basics of the game and more work for the Gamemaster to bring them up to speed.

Gamemaster Goodies

But there is still a lot of neat stuff in this game, especially for Whovians and Gamemasters. The first third of the Game Operations Manual is devoted to campaign advice, including how-to create one-shot games, story arcs, adapting published modules (this game was fairly well supported at the time) and capturing the essence of Doctor Who in your games. Then comes world and alien creation, a random-rollers dream! Tables will help a Gamemaster create all sorts of alien worlds for the players to explore and all of the exotic flora and fauna they may encounter. And when it comes to the human(oid) cultures the Doctor and his companions encounter, there are tables enough to create culture’s technological, scientific, and military levels. Of course, you can always create it on your own and use the tables as a source of information. Gamemasters get a run down of all the favourite Doctor Who monsters – those missing are covered in other supplements. In the Sourcebook for Field Agents, there is a multitude of information on the various species that have been featured in the show, information on the Time Lords’ planet and culture, information on Doctor Who’s Earth and equipment that the players may encounter or use, including the TARDIS. It also contains character information on the Doctor and his most popular companions from throughout his various incarnations.

Editing

The game suffers greatly in the way information is presented. As mentioned earlier in this review, sections are divided up strangely, leaving critical information in another section of the same book or a different book altogether. Worse, it’s not referenced. When going through the Players Book the first time, I thought that the lack of game mechanics for Special Abilities was an editing omission only to find the information later, by accident, in the Game Operation book. Worse still, because the information is separate, it gets repeated. You will get the “gist” of combat by reading the Player’s Book but will only be able to visualize the steps and “get” what the numbers mean by reading the Game Operations Manual because that’s where the Interaction Matrix table is. This unfathomable tactic is omnipresent and left me tearing my hair out to make sense of it.

The Cheese Factor or It’s Not the Game, But the Setting

When asked about Doctor Who, most think of giant rubber monster costumes, antiquated special effects and young British women from across the space/time continuum screaming their lungs out. The science of the science fiction was never all that good. There are huge inconsistencies between the Doctor Who timeline and that of the real world but that’s bound to happen when you have a show that spanned 30 years. The timeline will either have to be ignored, as it sometimes was in the show itself, or drastically altered for playability’s sake. But Doctor Who was never about science – it was about the effects of science on human society. These were stories of (relatively) ordinary men and women having to rise to extraordinary levels, to defend the defenseless, to right wrongs where they must, to champion reason over might. The game offers a truly timeless backdrop to the struggle between good and evil. If you buy this game, it’s not for the rules. The rules provide, at best, a clunky system that is not user or development friendly. If you buy (or recover) this game you are really buying the franchise of Doctor Who, whether as a fan of the show or someone who has a hundred what-if adventures in time and space that would suit the Doctor Who universe.

As much as it pains me, my rating for Style is a two overall 2, while for Substance I took the average of the Game Mechanics (2) and the Setting (4) to arrive at an overall score of 3.

The Doctor Who Role Playing Game
Author: Michael P. Bledsoe, William John Wheeler, Guy W. McLimore, Jr. Category: game Company/Publisher: FASA Line: Doctor Who Cost: rare item Page count: approx. 200 ISBN: 0-931787-90-4 SKU: 1500 Capsule Review by Stephanie Charette (Ashtal) on 06/06/00. Genre tags: Science fiction Modern day Historical Far Future	Forward: Doctor Who was one of the few games I couldn't find in RPG.net's review archive, and not only that, but there are two separate games. The Doctor Who Role Playing Game was released by FASA in 1984 while Time Lord was published by arrangement with BBC Books as a TV tie-in/game in 1991. (Makes you wonder if the BBC ever released a Coronation Street RPG…) This review will cover the first game released by FASA. Time Lord will be followed in a second review and will include information on using the two together. The Doctor Who Role Playing Game Released in 1984, this classic boxed set is now very hard to come by. In brief, for those who have missed the Doctor Who phenomenon, the game is based on the British television show of the same name that premiered in black and white in 1963 and ran until about 1990. It continues to remain a cult hit to this day. Fans remain hopeful that it will one day return to television or the big screen. Doctor Who was one of the first role-playing games to make time travel its primary focus, and do it well mostly, because the game draws on the strengths of three decades of episode history. The premise of both the show and the game is intriguing and daring: A race of near-immortal and scientifically advanced beings called Time Lords have the power to travel backwards in time. Our time, 21st Century earth, exists far in the past of the Time Lords, whose present day exists over 28,000 years into our future. Out of all the races in the universe, we humans are somehow crucial to the fabric of history and we tend to attract a lot of attention. In general, the Time Lords resist the temptation to tamper with the past, leaving the universe and humanity to fend for itself. The Doctor, an eccentric renegade by accident more than design, has long been hunted by his fellow Time Lords for meddling in affairs not meant to be meddled in even though it's always for the greater good. Add a malfunctioning TARDIS that catapults the Doctor and any accidental tourists that he collects into new and dangerous frontiers across time and space, and you have a setting that's almost perfect for a role-playing campaign. In The Box: The box showcases the most popular of the series' stars, the impossibly long-scarfed 4th Doctor (Jelly Babies anyone?) and his leather-clad barbarian companion Leela (the only Companion who didn't scream at everything). Inside are three books: The Players Manual – the absolute minimum basics of the game, The Game Operations Manual – intended for GMs, this has some duplicate sections which detail important, game-mechanic information left out of the Player's Guide as well as comprehensive how-to-Who Gamemaster advice, and The Sourcebook for Field Agents – all the other information that's vital to creating a Doctor Who campaign. In a tactile sense, these books are neat. The covers have a creased leather feel to them, even though they are regular paper and the design has a Victorian flavor that fits the style and flourish of Doctor Who. The books are set with three columns and include lots of black and white photographs from the series as well as stylized artwork that ranges from good to bad. The components listing in the Players Manual doesn't tell you how many dice come with the game (though my foggy memory insists that some did) or how many are required to play. Judging by the rest of the book, you'll want about a fistful of six-siders for each player to keep everyone happy and rolling. The structure of the game doesn't lend itself well to a book-by-book review because there is information that is either a) duplicated in the books or b) of vital importance to the players yet resides only in the Game Operations Manual. So instead the review is broken down into Character Generation, Game Mechanics & Gamemaster Material. Character Creation After the obligatory introduction to role-playing essay in the Player's Manual, readers are launched into character creation. Kind of. The three sections that describe the process are, to put it mildly, weird and include Defining A Character, Tabby Cats and Time Lords, and Creating Player Characters. Elements that define what a character is and what they can do, specifically their attributes, special abilities, skills, personality, appearance and background, are physically separated from the mechanics of how they work in the game. You can, for example, read about the special ability Enhanced Endurance in the Defining chapter, find out how you get it in the Creating chapter, and find out how it affects character creation in the Game Operations Manual. Between the character creation chapters is a piece of game fiction, Tabby Cats and Time Lords. The story is a flavor-piece designed to coax new players through character creation and to give an idea of what an adventure (minus game mechanics) might be like. As events happen in the story, new players are urged to go to the appropriate section in character creation, then jump back to the story. Why this was set between two critical chapters is beyond me. My preference would have been to have the story first, followed by the "laundry list" of the steps of character generation and the detailed information. As far as character creation goes, you'll need a lot of scrap paper alongside your sheet and you may want to read the chapters a few times before going ahead. You pick your species and your sex; the book assumes that you will be either a Gallifreyan Time Lord or a human from one of Earth's time periods. While several of the Doctor's companions came from other planets, they have all been essentially human. For something more exotic, the Gamemaster will have to improvise. Next, it's attribute scores, which are: Strength, Endurance, Dexterity, Charisma, Mentality, and Intuition. Attributes are rated in two ways: one with a point value or cost and one with a level value, called Performance Levels. These levels, ranked by roman numerals, run from Level I (Handicapped) to Level VII (Mastery). Everyone starts out with 6 points (Level III – Basic) in each attribute. Players roll 2d6 and add that to a bank of 36 points they can then use to allot to their attributes. Why not have each player start with a bank of 72+2d6 points? I don't know. Next, roll 3d6 and consult a table to determine your Special Ability. There are only a few abilities, but the options range from nothing (on the high point of the bell curve) to the drastic Telepathy or Telekinesis (on the far ends). This seems both unbalancing and needless. A few combat-related numbers are generated next, based on your Endurance, and then it's on to skills. Skills are ranked with the same Performance Levels scale as attributes. The book directs you to total up all the point values of your attributes to get your base bank of points to buy skills with. Now, throw it out. After telling you to total the numbers, the book then tells you that four of the attributes, Strength, Dexterity, Charisma and Mentality, all afford bonuses to skill purchase, depending on their level, for skills that fall under their domain. IE, if you have Level VI (Expert) for Mentality, each of those 21 Mentality points will be worth 6 points when you buy Mentality-affiliated skills such as engineering, gaming, or streetwise. So, get out your scrap paper, figure out the bonus conversions, and start buying skills. Once that's done, it's on to the last little touches. Don't count on playing an attractive, sleek barbarian who has a short fuse just yet, even if you've paid all the points to do just that. You have to roll a variety of d6 combinations to determine your Personality Trait, your Appearance, your Age, and your Apparent Age. A nasty roll combination can earn you a Fat, Short, Homely, Squeamish 18-year-old that looks like an Old Adult – too bad if you had the tough barbarian or anything else in mind. Only Gallifreyans that will have Real Age and Apparent Age discrepancies due to the Time Lords regeneration ability that necessitate the rule. My recommendation; toss this last bit right out, especially considering that age has no bearing on the amount of skill points you spend, even though that is counter-intuitive. The remaining character traits have no real impact on game play, so they are easily ignored if desired. I am guessing this system was put in place to reflect the nature of the series; Doctor Who was populated with "ordinary people", not supermodels. If you do want to roll random, though, do this part FIRST and then go back and buy your attributes and skills to reflect the rolls. In short, character generation is terrible and confusing – a system that takes the worst aspects of random rolling and point allocation and fuses them together. Thankfully, the more you do it, the easier and faster it gets. Game Mechanics There are two types of rolls used to resolve an in-game challenge, the Saving Roll and the Skill Roll. They are essentially the same but are based on the character's attribute or skill level respectively. A given Task will be assigned a difficulty level on the same I to VII scale. Modifiers, either positive or negative, are applied to both the Ability (either Attribute or Skill) and the Task. Once the totals are known, they are looked up on the Interaction Matrix table, which is a downright huge 25 by 25 table, almost as impressive as DC Heroes original main resolution table. When you plug in both the Task and the Ability value, you get a Target Number. Once you have the Target number, you roll 2d6 – if you roll lower, you succeed, if you roll higher, you fail. Rolls that are either five lower or five higher than the target number are either special successes or spectacular failures. For some reason, the Interaction Matrix table isn't included in the Players Manual, only the Game Operations Manual, which I found annoying. Before you roll, you have to add and subtract your modifiers. They come in two varieties. The Gamemaster assigns the first kind off the cuff and based on the situation at hand when it's not a combat situation (like a verbal conflict). The modifiers can quickly become impractical if every little advantage or disadvantage is taken into account, creating a laundry list of pluses and minuses until you arrive at your Target number. The second kind of modifier is generated from combat situations and include things like line of sight, concealment, movement modifiers from both sides, aiming, range, and size. Combat is very detailed and requires mapping out action scenes with graph paper, ironic considering the show's general lack of "shoot 'em!" style combat. When combat does come into play, the character's Action Points (APs), derived by taking your point total for Dexterity and dividing it by 3, determine how many things you can do in a ten second Turn, the unit of time for action sequences. If only players are involved in the scene, they can decided for themselves who will go first or go in order based on Dexterity, from highest to lowest. If there is a mixed bag of player characters and non-player characters, turns swap from side to side in Dexterity order. However, if someone on either side has the skill Small Unit Tactics (or has the higher skill level) that side will always go first in the turn exchange and they will be able to choose any character to be the one to act, regardless of skill or Dexterity level. Players and the Gamemaster can also choose to save some of their APs for opportunity actions, such as hiding or shooting, which are taken in response to the actions of others. While I can personally appreciate this approach, my mind boggles at how complicated a series of combat turns would become. With combat, comes injury, the last major game mechanic. There are two kinds of damage: Maximum Operating Damage (Max Op End) and Current Operating Damage (Curr Op End). The former reflects wound damage, the kind that can kill you and which will reduce your Curr Op End level and takes longer to heal, while the latter reflects temporary damage from non-lethal damage like a stun gun, drugs or fatigue, which can often be healed with rest. The rates of healing for both kinds of damage depend on current conditions of the character and the character’s Wound Heal and Fatigue Heal levels. Damage in Doctor Who is both serious and potentially deadly which, I feel, better reflects the spirit of Doctor Who than the game’s detailed combat rules. Many of the game’s core mechanics are elaborated upon in the Game Operations Manual, a book meant only for the Gamemaster. While there are some elements that should be shielded from the player’s eyes, specifically things such as the species listings, there is a great deal of material from character creation and combat that are only fully explained in the latter half of this book. It makes it harder for the player to understand the basics of the game and more work for the Gamemaster to bring them up to speed. Gamemaster Goodies But there is still a lot of neat stuff in this game, especially for Whovians and Gamemasters. The first third of the Game Operations Manual is devoted to campaign advice, including how-to create one-shot games, story arcs, adapting published modules (this game was fairly well supported at the time) and capturing the essence of Doctor Who in your games. Then comes world and alien creation, a random-rollers dream! Tables will help a Gamemaster create all sorts of alien worlds for the players to explore and all of the exotic flora and fauna they may encounter. And when it comes to the human(oid) cultures the Doctor and his companions encounter, there are tables enough to create culture’s technological, scientific, and military levels. Of course, you can always create it on your own and use the tables as a source of information. Gamemasters get a run down of all the favourite Doctor Who monsters – those missing are covered in other supplements. In the Sourcebook for Field Agents, there is a multitude of information on the various species that have been featured in the show, information on the Time Lords’ planet and culture, information on Doctor Who’s Earth and equipment that the players may encounter or use, including the TARDIS. It also contains character information on the Doctor and his most popular companions from throughout his various incarnations. Editing The game suffers greatly in the way information is presented. As mentioned earlier in this review, sections are divided up strangely, leaving critical information in another section of the same book or a different book altogether. Worse, it’s not referenced. When going through the Players Book the first time, I thought that the lack of game mechanics for Special Abilities was an editing omission only to find the information later, by accident, in the Game Operation book. Worse still, because the information is separate, it gets repeated. You will get the “gist” of combat by reading the Player’s Book but will only be able to visualize the steps and “get” what the numbers mean by reading the Game Operations Manual because that’s where the Interaction Matrix table is. This unfathomable tactic is omnipresent and left me tearing my hair out to make sense of it. The Cheese Factor or It’s Not the Game, But the Setting When asked about Doctor Who, most think of giant rubber monster costumes, antiquated special effects and young British women from across the space/time continuum screaming their lungs out. The science of the science fiction was never all that good. There are huge inconsistencies between the Doctor Who timeline and that of the real world but that’s bound to happen when you have a show that spanned 30 years. The timeline will either have to be ignored, as it sometimes was in the show itself, or drastically altered for playability’s sake. But Doctor Who was never about science – it was about the effects of science on human society. These were stories of (relatively) ordinary men and women having to rise to extraordinary levels, to defend the defenseless, to right wrongs where they must, to champion reason over might. The game offers a truly timeless backdrop to the struggle between good and evil. If you buy this game, it’s not for the rules. The rules provide, at best, a clunky system that is not user or development friendly. If you buy (or recover) this game you are really buying the franchise of Doctor Who, whether as a fan of the show or someone who has a hundred what-if adventures in time and space that would suit the Doctor Who universe. As much as it pains me, my rating for Style is a two overall 2, while for Substance I took the average of the Game Mechanics (2) and the Setting (4) to arrive at an overall score of 3.