It’s been years since we hosted a Doctor Who-themed RPG session, but when Cubicle 7 (the publisher of the original Doctor Who RPG) announced that they were…
…working on Doctors and Daleks β a new line of products that brings Doctor Who adventures to your table using 5th Edition rules! The first release β The Doctors and Daleks Playerβs Guide will launch soon.
Doctor Who logo β’ & Β© BBC 2018.
We were hooked on the idea! (Honestly, because we’ve already invested so heavily into Dungeons & Dragons, it was very palatable to hop aboard the TARDIS as a gateway to hosting more Doctor Who-themed games.)
Fast forward to 2023…
…and we ambitiously hosted a Doctors & Daleks game at our tabletop RPG gaming subevent at Season4Otaku. We looked long and hard at the problem of actually printing materials to run the game for beginners of both Doctor Who (the franchise) and Dungeons & Dragons (the game).
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Easy for existing D&D players to join the game… | …but the overlap between D&D players and fans of Doctor Who in Malaysia was small… |
| Doctor Who is a more meme-able franchise than the world of Forgotten Realms (the latter is too vast and wasn’t as visually iconic.) | Doctor Who fans may be happy to debate and theorize about the wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey aspects of the lore, but weren’t used to the interactivity (as opposed to passively absorbing the franchise’s multimedia.) |
| From a D&D standpoint, what made D&D special was… Plot Armour referenced as Plot Points, a franchise-appropriate relabeling of HP… | |
| Unique Classes: Charmer, Empath, Protector, Stalwart, Thinker, Trickster. | Spellcasting for everyone, but relabeled as quips (a reference to an iconic part of Doctor Who: the ability to resolve conflicts without violence per se.) |
We checked Cubicle 7’s resource page, and discovered that aside from The Doctor’s character sheet, there weren’t any pregen char sheets ready to plug-and-play with out-of-the-box. So, we rolled up our sleeves and…
