overgeeked
B/X Known World
While some will insist on being a broken record and saying, "ew, 5E" again and again without adding anything to the conversation, here's to hoping that's kept to a minimum or left off entirely.
And the quips. A lot of them are copied & pasted SRD spells with the names changed and only ever so slight alterations made. For example, goodberry is basically copy & pasted here as Jelly Baby. There's also a weird balance hold-over from D&D with quips that are largely verbal, as in they have a V component, and affect anyone who can hear you...up to a bizarrely limited range, 30-60 feet is the common range. Then there's the dozens of Quip Cantrips that are basically variations on "target makes X save, takes Y damage, and suffers Z minor effect." These could have been one game effect with a few options to pick from rather than dozens of individual entries.
Many Quips are largely disassociated mechanics despite the frequent admonitions in the book to keep them utterly grounded in the fiction. For example, the Grease Quip. The book says that, "When a Thinker uses the Grease Quip, they’re not summoning the material from the aether, they’re quickly finding something slick and slimy nearby and throwing it at the target." Okay. The mechanics for the Grease Quip are identical to the grease spell in the 5E SRD. So the character using this Quip can cover a 10x10 area with grease by "quickly finding something slick and slimy nearby". The material component for 5E spells as Quips is left to the referee to decide. So they can easily declare that this action is impossible without a sufficient amount of "slick and slimy" stuff nearby. But, if there is sufficient "slick and slimy" stuff nearby...why is the character without this Quip unable to achieve the same effect? Likewise, is the character able to use this Quip regardless of the presence of sufficiently "slick and slimy" stuff nearby? Then aren't they in fact summoning "slick and slimy" stuff from the aether?
The book seems to suggest both yes and no. Yes, because it's the character using their brains, verbal wit, and experience to cobble something together. No, because Quips aren't magic and you cannot summon these effect from the aether. Then there's the question of their limited uses. All leveled Quips are limited to once per long rest. So, regardless of the presence of "slick and slimy" stuff in the environment, your Thinker can only use the Grease Quip once per day. Sure, that works in a balance and mechanics sense, but it creates ludonarrative dissonance when the character's brains, verbal wit, and experience are able to achieve these things only a limited number of times per day...regardless of the presence or absence of various materials in the environment to replicate these effects. So it's either summoning "slick and slimy" stuff from the aether or it's an environmental effect that doesn't require a Quip to achieve in the first place...and shouldn't be limited to once per day. Disassociated mechanics and ludonarrative dissonance.
Lastly, the species. Two stand out. Aliens and Time Lords. For aliens not listed you're told to use the human species and pick appropriate stats and feats to get close enough. Makes sense given the sheer variety of aliens the Doctor has encountered. Not sure that's going to go over well. The whole point of crunchy games is the crunch. And then Time Lords. Ugh. Time Lords are inherently incredibly powerful. Which the game honors. Despite letting the players pick Time Lord as their starting character species. So one player option race lets you start with more stat bonuses, more power, more abilities, more skills, oh...and your ability score caps for INT, WIS, and CHA are 30...and the others get less...a lot less. Can't imagine which species is going to basically be the default for most 5E players trying this game.
The Doctor Who RPG's famous and amazing initiative order makes a (slightly altered) appearance here. Here initiative order is: Talkers, Doers, Fighters. Importantly you seem to only get to do one action in a round, though if that's explicitly stated, I seem to have missed it, because there are penalties for switching your action for the round and there's no discussion of doing multiple things in a round. You either: Talk, Do (work machinery/tool, run), or Fight. Not a combination of those. This perfectly suits Doctor Who.
The Escalation mechanics is great. The line between talking (roleplaying) and an encounter (combat) is incredibly blurry in Doctor Who RPGs considering in Doctor Who talking is combat. So in comes the Escalation mechanic. If anyone on your side (PCs or enemies) takes things from just talking (including inflicting emotional or logical damage) to actual physical harm (any other type of damage), then going forward your opponents have advantage on all saves against emotional and logical damage. Basically, as long as your side keeps things civil (emotional and logical arguments), then you can talk your opponents down. If you try to talk them into giving up while also trying to beat them into submission, they're going to basically ignore your appeals to reason and emotion. Wonderfully Doctor Who.
Collaborative Checks are interesting. They're a combination of 5E's group checks and 4E's skill challenges...but in a good way. Everyone involved gets to describe what they're doing and make a check. The PCs don't get to roll the same skill in a given round, i.e. if one PC rolls Engineering, no one else gets to roll Engineering that round. And yes, Collaborative Checks occur over rounds. If half or more of the PCs succeed on their individual checks, that counts as a group success for that round; if not, that counts as a group failure that round. The PCs want three successful rounds before three failed rounds. It's a great idea and I want to see it in play, but if I remember right, the math on skill challenges doesn't quite work out, especially the three successes before three failures part. So that's likely going to be house ruled, at least at my table. Still, great subsystem.
And then Encounters. This is the good stuff. Instead of individual enemies having hit points to whittle down, the whole encounter has a pool of plot points (functionally identical to hit points) and when those plot points are gone, the enemy gives up. This pool can represent any number of enemies. So anywhere from one to a billion, billion Daleks. That's great. The game also provides advice on how to handle the actual number of enemies in regards to their number of attacks and damage. The idea being to challenge the PCs but not slaughter them in the name of giving every single enemy an attack. If your PCs are equal to or outnumber the enemies, the enemies attack individually. If the enemies outnumber your PCs, the enemies as a group get one attack per PC with advantage. That's fantastic. Again, simple and elegant. And interestingly, the numbers are almost identical to baseline CR in D&D proper.
There's also a lot of little things throughout that make the book useful. Rules for time travel, space travel, working in various environments and atmospheric conditions, gravity, vacuum, radiation...on and on. There's a lot.
#
So, for those with the book (well, PDF), what do you think so far? How much have you read? Spotted any fun stuff? What's neat? What's lame? Etc?
The "Bad"
A couple of iffy and/or negative things really stood out to me. There's a lot of copied & pasted text from the other Doctor Who RPG line. It makes sense, though. They already make a Doctor Who RPG, so why not. Most of the ideas and advice will naturally carry over. Yes, agreed. It's still odd and more than a bit jarring and off-putting as someone who's bought a goodly chunk of the exact same text before. There's also quite a bit of repetition in the book. Sometimes several paragraphs are repeated 3-4 times in different places in the book, but more often it's a few sentences repeated verbatim again and again. They likely could have saved several dozen pages by not doing that, lowered the page count, and lowered the price tag. Some stuff just seems awkwardly shoe-horned in, like classes and subclasses. It's a show about smart, witty heroes outsmarting bad guys trying to take over worlds...the use of six classes and 18 subclasses just doesn't quite work. There's so much conceptual overlap that I see these class and subclass distinctions being incredibly confusing at the table.And the quips. A lot of them are copied & pasted SRD spells with the names changed and only ever so slight alterations made. For example, goodberry is basically copy & pasted here as Jelly Baby. There's also a weird balance hold-over from D&D with quips that are largely verbal, as in they have a V component, and affect anyone who can hear you...up to a bizarrely limited range, 30-60 feet is the common range. Then there's the dozens of Quip Cantrips that are basically variations on "target makes X save, takes Y damage, and suffers Z minor effect." These could have been one game effect with a few options to pick from rather than dozens of individual entries.
Many Quips are largely disassociated mechanics despite the frequent admonitions in the book to keep them utterly grounded in the fiction. For example, the Grease Quip. The book says that, "When a Thinker uses the Grease Quip, they’re not summoning the material from the aether, they’re quickly finding something slick and slimy nearby and throwing it at the target." Okay. The mechanics for the Grease Quip are identical to the grease spell in the 5E SRD. So the character using this Quip can cover a 10x10 area with grease by "quickly finding something slick and slimy nearby". The material component for 5E spells as Quips is left to the referee to decide. So they can easily declare that this action is impossible without a sufficient amount of "slick and slimy" stuff nearby. But, if there is sufficient "slick and slimy" stuff nearby...why is the character without this Quip unable to achieve the same effect? Likewise, is the character able to use this Quip regardless of the presence of sufficiently "slick and slimy" stuff nearby? Then aren't they in fact summoning "slick and slimy" stuff from the aether?
The book seems to suggest both yes and no. Yes, because it's the character using their brains, verbal wit, and experience to cobble something together. No, because Quips aren't magic and you cannot summon these effect from the aether. Then there's the question of their limited uses. All leveled Quips are limited to once per long rest. So, regardless of the presence of "slick and slimy" stuff in the environment, your Thinker can only use the Grease Quip once per day. Sure, that works in a balance and mechanics sense, but it creates ludonarrative dissonance when the character's brains, verbal wit, and experience are able to achieve these things only a limited number of times per day...regardless of the presence or absence of various materials in the environment to replicate these effects. So it's either summoning "slick and slimy" stuff from the aether or it's an environmental effect that doesn't require a Quip to achieve in the first place...and shouldn't be limited to once per day. Disassociated mechanics and ludonarrative dissonance.
Lastly, the species. Two stand out. Aliens and Time Lords. For aliens not listed you're told to use the human species and pick appropriate stats and feats to get close enough. Makes sense given the sheer variety of aliens the Doctor has encountered. Not sure that's going to go over well. The whole point of crunchy games is the crunch. And then Time Lords. Ugh. Time Lords are inherently incredibly powerful. Which the game honors. Despite letting the players pick Time Lord as their starting character species. So one player option race lets you start with more stat bonuses, more power, more abilities, more skills, oh...and your ability score caps for INT, WIS, and CHA are 30...and the others get less...a lot less. Can't imagine which species is going to basically be the default for most 5E players trying this game.
The Good
But enough of that. On to the good stuff. Speaking of materials in the environment, I really like Environmental Actions. By interacting with the environment in fun and creative ways, PCs can impose a condition on their target. Either the PC makes an ability check or the target has to make a save. Damage may or may not be involved. The condition lasts until the end of the next turn. It's simple. It's elegant. It's Doctor Who. I honestly wish the list of Quip Cantrips and their minor variations were handled like this. Make a roll (or save), take some damage, and pick an effect to impose on the target. Done.The Doctor Who RPG's famous and amazing initiative order makes a (slightly altered) appearance here. Here initiative order is: Talkers, Doers, Fighters. Importantly you seem to only get to do one action in a round, though if that's explicitly stated, I seem to have missed it, because there are penalties for switching your action for the round and there's no discussion of doing multiple things in a round. You either: Talk, Do (work machinery/tool, run), or Fight. Not a combination of those. This perfectly suits Doctor Who.
The Escalation mechanics is great. The line between talking (roleplaying) and an encounter (combat) is incredibly blurry in Doctor Who RPGs considering in Doctor Who talking is combat. So in comes the Escalation mechanic. If anyone on your side (PCs or enemies) takes things from just talking (including inflicting emotional or logical damage) to actual physical harm (any other type of damage), then going forward your opponents have advantage on all saves against emotional and logical damage. Basically, as long as your side keeps things civil (emotional and logical arguments), then you can talk your opponents down. If you try to talk them into giving up while also trying to beat them into submission, they're going to basically ignore your appeals to reason and emotion. Wonderfully Doctor Who.
Collaborative Checks are interesting. They're a combination of 5E's group checks and 4E's skill challenges...but in a good way. Everyone involved gets to describe what they're doing and make a check. The PCs don't get to roll the same skill in a given round, i.e. if one PC rolls Engineering, no one else gets to roll Engineering that round. And yes, Collaborative Checks occur over rounds. If half or more of the PCs succeed on their individual checks, that counts as a group success for that round; if not, that counts as a group failure that round. The PCs want three successful rounds before three failed rounds. It's a great idea and I want to see it in play, but if I remember right, the math on skill challenges doesn't quite work out, especially the three successes before three failures part. So that's likely going to be house ruled, at least at my table. Still, great subsystem.
And then Encounters. This is the good stuff. Instead of individual enemies having hit points to whittle down, the whole encounter has a pool of plot points (functionally identical to hit points) and when those plot points are gone, the enemy gives up. This pool can represent any number of enemies. So anywhere from one to a billion, billion Daleks. That's great. The game also provides advice on how to handle the actual number of enemies in regards to their number of attacks and damage. The idea being to challenge the PCs but not slaughter them in the name of giving every single enemy an attack. If your PCs are equal to or outnumber the enemies, the enemies attack individually. If the enemies outnumber your PCs, the enemies as a group get one attack per PC with advantage. That's fantastic. Again, simple and elegant. And interestingly, the numbers are almost identical to baseline CR in D&D proper.
There's also a lot of little things throughout that make the book useful. Rules for time travel, space travel, working in various environments and atmospheric conditions, gravity, vacuum, radiation...on and on. There's a lot.
The Ugly
Absolutely nothing. The book is gorgeous and absolutely festooned with great images from the TV show.#
So, for those with the book (well, PDF), what do you think so far? How much have you read? Spotted any fun stuff? What's neat? What's lame? Etc?
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