FASA Doctor Who RPG

[sabrinathecat]

I've been trying to read the rule book for the old FASA RPG, but it is stiff going. It seems to be a mixed bag of trying to make rules and trying to describe what an RPG is.

Anyone remember how this game plays? Was it any good?

 

[Piratecat]

I have a copy, but I've never played. That bad?

 

[sabrinathecat]

Thick reading. No real effort at DTP or presentable layout. (hey, it was early 80s)
Ugly font.
No idea how it plays. Been a while since I tried reading/parsing through the text. Lots of mis-placed info.
I was just trying to get an idea on whether it was worth trying to pick it up again and parse through it all.

 

[MerricB]

Honestly, these days I'd go with the Cubicle 7 "Adventures in Time and Space" game. I ran the FASA Doctor Who RPG back in the day (very long ago now!) and had fun with it, but it's a problematic system - a lot of mechanics which don't really work that well today.

Most of the fun I had with it mainly came from my invention as a DM of the situations than through the mechanics.

Cheers!

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

I never bothered with the game: it always seemed to me that the time travel element is more of a (nearly literal) deus ex machina, with the rest being mainly an adventure setting with a wide variety of tech levels. Almost any Sci-Fi system should handle it, once you have races statted out.

 

[Morrus]

I've never played it; I saw it briefly once, many years ago. I've never - to my knowledge - met anybody who's played it!

 

[nerfherder]

I've never played it. The one time I played a Dr Who game in the 80's, we used the Call of Cthulhu rules - and in fact were told that it was a game of Call of Cthulhu. My character wrecked his Bentley trying to smash open the door of the mysterious garden shed...

 

[JediSoth]

I have played it, so now, Morrus, you can say you've met someone who has. It was the mid-80s, though and I don't remember much about it. We only played one or two sessions of it. I did own it (and sold it and recently reacquired it), and it was responsible for me knowing anything at all about Doctor Who until I started watching the new series a few years ago.

The system does read a bit clunky compared with Cubicle 7's Adventures in Time and Space (which I have played several sessions of and enjoyed thoroughly), but it's a typically dense FASA RPG. It has a ton of information (up to the end of the Fifth Doctor basically). I actually find it a bit hard to read because the font is so small (a sure sign of aging).