Doctor Who RPG: Denouement

When my Doctor Who campaign returns from its holiday hiatus, I’m probably going to run it using Primetime Adventures rather than DW: Adventures in Time and Space. Nothing against the latter system; I like it a lot, it’s very elegant and has a lot of good ideas. As a player, knowing that you always roll 2d6 for everything makes things simple. As a gamemaster, picking odd combinations of attributes and skills and telling the player to add those to their roll is a hoot. After the first session I never cracked a book or looked at the GM screen I made, because the game is so easy to run.

The problem is the setting itself. No matter how hard I as the gamemaster tried to keep things from being Doctor-centric, as long as the Doctor was a player character everyone sort of looked at him for their cues. This might work at a table with 2 or 3 players; I have 6. If we were playing without a Doctor, in an all-UNIT, all-Torchwood, or some other sort of variant, it might work. The other problem is that the Doctor is so much more powerful than anyone else. Why should any other player character do anything, when the Doctor is going to have the best chance of success? It took a lot of gamemaster finagling to force any sort of balance into the game, and even then there were entire sessions when a player or two basically sat there watching.

There are a lot of upsides in switching to PTA. First, the Doctor being “better” is a narrative, not a mechanical, device. This mean that in reality, anyone has as good a chance of doing something awesome as the Doctor does. Second, with screen presence and spotlight episodes, everyone knows that their character will get there moment. Maybe not this episode, maybe not next, but they know which episode will be all about them and can build toward it. Third, and most importantly, it can still be Doctor-centric and everyone still gets to play. Everyone gets to suggest a scene, everyone gets to narrate scenes, and they can do so even if their character isn’t even in the episode. In every PTA game I’ve played or run, the shared gamemastering aspect has meant that everyone is engaged, everyone is involved, and everyone is having fun. That’s the way a Doctor Who game should be; even the Doctor would tell you, Companions matter!