So I really don’t see why @richrogers should have all the fun with the Star Wars Saturday’s. My obsession is Doctor Who - I’m definitely planning Beautiful Anomalies very soon - what other games could be hacked into Doctor Who themed story games (I know there is an official game but it just emulates the RTD era and not my cup of tea)
Adventures in Time and Space
There is Companions which is a powered by apocalypse hack where you the play the companions of the Doctor after they died.
Thats… a really good question. My Doctor is about teamwork and violence as a last resort, so whatever gives mechanical benefits to engineer that behavior is important.
Star Trek has a system of pooling together d20s as a team, but it might be too rigid for the nebulous weirdness Doctor Who demands. Dogs in the Vineyard has a great little escalation mechanic that I’d want to use, but would require a good deal of hacking. I’d probably use some PbtA system with special moves for different playbooks in the group. The Doctor, the Companion, the Love Interest, etc.
I’ve had half a mind to hack Lovecraftesque for that purpose. The Witness is the Doctor whose role is to discover clues to what the big bad is up to; the Watchers are companions whose role is to ask questions and be scared; the Narrator reveals what the baddies are up to.
Slow build, sudden acceleration at the end, big confrontation. The main difference is that the Doctor wins, so you have some kind of mixed mechanic there. One person reveals what the baddies were up to, and then another person reveals how the Doctor is going to beat them anyway.
You probably need a longer epilogue, too, since Who rarely ends with a big bang.
I have not played it yet, but Companions’ Tale might be worth a look?
Or Good Society - if you really want to upset the narrative like, a lot, just let the Doctor jump into everything at mid-point and confuse the hell out of everyone.
Who just ends. It rarely really epilogues- only at the end of a main character arc.
Would take some hard hacking - but possibly.
Timewatch, perhaps – but Timewatch is about time travel in a way that Doctor Who probably ought not to be, especially if you’re going for the classic era.
One of the things that’s so interesting to me about classic Who is that it just doesn’t have a consistent genre. Like, The Gunfighters isn’t an episode set in 19th-century Arizona, it’s a western, with a very different tone and very different story structures than other episodes of the same season.
So it feels like in theory you would want something where you could actually redefine the game, at least to some extent, from story to story. I don’t know. That might be a lot of work, and it might be a gimmick.
Monster of the Week could be used. Both Investigate a Mystery and Read a bad situation have options to outwit your opponent, which Dr Who is all about.
The Crooked, Expert, Flake, Initiate, Mundane, Profesisonal, Wronged all work.
One of the things Dr Who does well is balance between alien of the week and recurring villains (cybermen, daleks, sillurians).
've got the following so far:
- Quiet Year, Before the Daleks came
- Good Society, Love and Romance in the Citadel of Gallifrey
- The Watch, the fall of Arcadia
- Ten Candles, Cybermen
- Legacy: The War in Time (Using Godsend as the base for rival factions in the time war)
- Dead Friend: The final moments of a timelord facing regeneration
- With Fire Thy Affections hold a wing - The relationship of a renegade Timelord and their TARDIS
This has wings I think - providing there enough lords and ladies of Time out there