D&D 5E Doctors & Daleks - Cubicle 7 Brings Doctor Who to D&D 5E

Cubicle 7 -- makers of the official Doctor Who roleplaying game -- has announced that the Doctor will officially be coming to 5E soon under the name Doctors and Daleks. There are no dates or details yet, over than that the Doctors and Daleks Player's Guide will launch 'soon'.

A NEW COMPANION FOR YOUR ADVENTURES THROUGH ALL OF SPACE AND TIME!

The wild adventures of everyone’s favourite Time Lord comes to the world’s most popular roleplaying game in Doctors and Daleks. Take your gaming group into the TARDIS and travel anywhere, anywhen. Want to meet Leornado da Vinci? Or see what life is like in the year 3,000? What about another planet entirely? All of space and time is your Venusian macro-oyster, but keep your wits about you — there’s a lot of danger in the vastness of eternity.

We are delighted to announce that we are working on Doctors and Daleks – a new line of products that brings Doctor Who adventures to your table using 5th Edition rules! The first release – The Doctors and Daleks Player’s Guide will launch soon.

The wild adventures of everyone’s favourite Time Lord comes to the world’s most popular roleplaying game in Doctors and Daleks. Take your gaming group into the TARDIS and travel anywhere, anywhen.

We’ll also continue to support the new Second Edition of our award winning Doctor Who: The Roleplaying Game, with a host of new products on the way soon!

 

[Morrus]

There's a bunch but I don't think any of them have really made a splash.

A lot of those looks like systems based on or inspired by 4E, but I'm not seeing any direct retroclones there (unless I'm missing it?)

 

[Jer]

Has it not been retrocloned by anybody? Seems like the sort of thing somebody would do.

4e's in a weird space because it's technically still available but unsupported. Because you can still buy all of the books in PDF on DriveThru.

So a lot of the retroclones tend to be 4e+ where each cloner has fixed somethings they thought were broken in 4e because making a pure clone is not as necessary. I don't think there's a pure 4e retroclone out there (or if there is I haven't found it yet). But that also means that there's no way to build a community of support for new 4e products because you're still tied to the GSL if you want to go that route.

 

[eyeheartawk]

A lot of those looks like systems based on or inspired by 4E, but I'm not seeing any direct retroclones there (unless I'm missing it?)

Huh, I guess you're right. It looks like a couple got close to a OSRIC like restatement of the game but made some changes or were incomplete. We now know that OSRIC was ultimately unnecessary to create AD&D compatible modules, but at the time nobody was sure about the limits of the OGL. I wonder if because of the GSL, a 4e OSRIC would be necessary to really make truly 100% compatible 4e content instead?

 

[Yaarel]

@Bacon Bits

The way to make rituals accessible is to require skill checks to perform them. Thus, both the Wizard and the Fighter use the Arcana skill to perform the Detect Magic spell as a ritual.

Thus. Every ritual has a chance of failure. A Wizard can optionally spend a spell slot to cast it.

Probably the DC for the check to perform a skill check is a number equal to 10 + the spell points of the spell. See the DMs Guide. The DC will range from 12 to 23 depending on the slot level of the spell. (Albeit the spells themselves require a cleanup to reevaluate which slot level each belongs in.) Ones character level must be at least twice the slot level to perform it.

The "Ritual Caster" feature and feat no longer exist. Anyone with proficiency in the Arcana skill qualifies as a Ritual Caster.



Possibly different skills are responsible for different rituals. So Animal Handling does rituals relating to animals. Medicine healing rituals. Nature does rituals relating to earth, air, fire, water, and plants. Religion handles any astral plane spells. Insight mind-effect rituals. Arcana only performs rituals relating to ether, force, and magic itself. But one needs Arcana to be able to perform a ritual in the first place, tho the check might need an other skill.

 

[darjr]

A 4e retro clone would allow places like Roll20 to sell new core rules and such. Which I dint think they do? Can you buy 4e content on the various VTTs?

 

[Jer]

I wonder if because of the GSL, a 4e OSRIC would be necessary to really make truly 100% compatible 4e content instead?

I'd be very leery of publishing anything 4e related without consulting a lawyer because of the GSL. I've actually thought at times about using the 5e SRD to recreate 4e as much as can be possibly done, but I usually decide I'd rather work on my own 13th Age hacks than dive into trying to rebuild 4e. Especially given that first sentence where I'd want to talk to a lawyer if I wanted to sell anything even as a hobbyist because even though Wizards has no real interest in "protecting" the 4e rules anymore, the GSL is still just sitting there like a landmine waiting to go off.

 

[Bacon Bits]

@Bacon Bits

If the noncasters shut down at level 12, then level 13 is "epic". So this seems like the level casters should start gaining powerful spells.

I'm not sure I follow that logic. If non-casters stop scaling, but casters go epic, why does that mean the game is epic? We haven't done anything to make non-casters epic.

Telepathy needs to be a slot 2 spell.

I just think it's redundant with Rary's telepathic bond (5th).

Legend Lore is merely something the History skill check can do. Glibness is the Deception skill check.

Glibness isn't much better than enhance ability (eagle's splendor). Not such that it demands it's own spell to overcome the limitations of enhance ability.

Redundant spells need a cleanup.

Generally high slot spells need a clean up.

Teleport Circle is like an airport and works fine, and once built, noncasters can use them too.

Word of Recall, Wind Walk, Tree Stride, Summon Steed, Transport via Plants, etc. There are so many spells already that enhance travel speeds. The game doesn't really benefit that much from a super power like Teleport existing.

There are so many spells that just boggle my mind for why they exist. Speak with dead? Zone of truth? Find the path? True seeing (for an hour without concentration)? Knock? If this is a game about going on adventures and telling stories and overcoming challenges, what kind of stories are you going to tell with these effects if you can overcome so many standard narrative obstacles with spells? It's just weird. It's like they're a walking deus ex machina. "I just cast a spell that unloads Chekhov's gun."

It feels like they just dumped in all the spells that people remember without thinking what role that spell was supposed to play in the game. Especially compared to how PCs that don't have those effects have to overcome them. When you get to 7th and higher level spells, it's really clear that at no point did make these pretty simple design considerations.

The reallife stories of visiting the dead in the underworld are simply places in the Material where the veil between it and Shadowfell are thin. It is like a negative Fey crossing. Noncasters can pass thru a Shadow crossing easily enough.

Sure, but the trouble with that is that it's 100% up to the DM. The PCs -- all PCs above some arbitrary level -- need to be able to have enough control to be able to traverse the planes at the player's choice, not just because the DM decides the story should go that way. But the way the game is written, you must have a wizard or cleric to do that. If a party of fighters wants to find a long dead monarch, they have travel to the afterlife to talk to them. But a wizard or a cleric makes that even easier, too.

I'm not saying that wizards and clerics can't have spells that do things fighters can't. But if the game can be about travelling the planes -- and I think that at high level it should be -- then the game shouldn't de facto require certain classes to accomplish that and should otherwise be DM fiat. If a high level fighter wants to rescue his true love from the pits of Gehenna, then it shouldn't be orders of magnitude more complicated for them to do it than a spellcaster. And the solution shouldn't be "find a spellcaster".

 

[Bacon Bits]

I'd be very leery of publishing anything 4e related without consulting a lawyer because of the GSL. I've actually thought at times about using the 5e SRD to recreate 4e as much as can be possibly done, but I usually decide I'd rather work on my own 13th Age hacks than dive into trying to rebuild 4e. Especially given that first sentence where I'd want to talk to a lawyer if I wanted to sell anything even as a hobbyist because even though Wizards has no real interest in "protecting" the 4e rules anymore, the GSL is still just sitting there like a landmine waiting to go off.

Yeah, the GSL was the reason that there was so little third party content, and I can't imagine anyone would want to rely on the Berne convention alone to publish a clone. That license did exactly what WotC intended it to do: build a wall around 4e.

 

[eyeheartawk]

I'd be very leery of publishing anything 4e related without consulting a lawyer because of the GSL. I've actually thought at times about using the 5e SRD to recreate 4e as much as can be possibly done, but I usually decide I'd rather work on my own 13th Age hacks than dive into trying to rebuild 4e. Especially given that first sentence where I'd want to talk to a lawyer if I wanted to sell anything even as a hobbyist because even though Wizards has no real interest in "protecting" the 4e rules anymore, the GSL is still just sitting there like a landmine waiting to go off.

Yeah, I mean, in theory, as long as you avoid using the protected terms in the GSL you could make an OGL version of 4e couldn't you? Game mechanics aren't protect by IP law, so as long as you state the mechanics in a unique fashion from 4e and avoid the product identity stuff, you should be good?

 

[darjr]

I wish WotC would just OGL 4e. I realize it might be less than worth the effort for WotC.