D&D 5E The Official 5E Version Of Doctor Who Is Coming In Just 2 Weeks!

In two weeks (or back in 2022 depending where in space and time you are right now) Cubicle 7 will be launching DOCTORS & DALEKS, the 5E version of its popular Doctor Who: Adventures in Time & Space tabletop RPG which has been in production for over a decade.

The game launches on Tuesday, July 19th with the Doctors and Daleks Player’s Guide.

Cubicle 7 has been producing the official Doctor Who RPG since 2009, with over 20 books. A second edition launched last year. This new edition is the D&D 5E edition, and was first announced back in February.

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...

www.enworld.org

Doctors and Daleks​

A New Way to Adventure through all of Space and Time

Doctors and Daleks brings the epic adventures of the Universe’s most famous Time Lord to the world’s most popular roleplaying game. Running parallel to the award winning Doctor Who: The Roleplaying Game, Doctors and Daleks is a new line of products that brings Doctor Whoadventures to your table using 5th Edition rules.

The first book, the Doctors and Daleks Players Guide, brings you everything you need to get started with your adventures in Space and Time!

• Streamlined character creation rules to quickly bring to life a new time travelling adventurer. Create a new Companion for the Doctor, or build your own Time Lord! Do you want to do a bit of time tourism as part of Team TARDIS, or will you create a group of Time Agents to fight back against pesky paradoxes?
• Rules for playing fast paced, combat light sci-fi adventures using the world’s most popular roleplaying game system. Fight like the Doctor with non-lethal weapons, manoeuvres, gadgets, and the power of emotional and logical arguments — or just run away really fast!
• A time traveller’s treasure trove of technological marvels, including sonic screwdrivers, psychic paper, a water gun, and time machines.
• Rules for using and customising the TARDIS, as well as creating and piloting any other kind of time travel device you can think of from the dawn of history to the very ends of the universe.
• Advice on making every Doctors and Daleks adventure feel like you’re living in an episode of the legendary Doctor Who TV Series.
• An expansive look at the history of the Doctor’s Universe, detailing some of the aliens and creatures the Doctor has encountered across space and time, including profiles for Daleks, Cybermen, and Weeping Angels, ready to be played!

The Doctors and Daleks Player’s Guide will be followed by the Alien Archive, a dedicated catalogue of some of the Doctor’s most notorious foes, presenting dozens of recognisable aliens from the series for the players to add to their games.

Alongside these, The Keys of Scaravore is an epic adventure for levels 1-5, that leads the characters to the Wild West and distant worlds, encountering Draconians, Silurians, Zygons, and more, before finally facing the terrifying Scaravore itself.

 

[Weiley31]

Also do you guys know Spelljammer is conformed yet?

SHUT THE FRONT DOOR!!!!!

 

[Weiley31]

( not sure how one would play a cyberman or dalek TBH

Well, I can imagine an "exiled" Dalek being PC because some political rivals/nemesis pushed em out and said Dalek PC now has to lick its wounds to strike back at the proper time. I've seen a Cyberman in one of the 11th/12th seaons, I think, that was Cyberized, but then was able to break through the programing and become good/remember his girl again. So that's possible.

It's the Weeping Angels. THOSE I'm still wondering how one plays that considering their unique nature.
But in all honesty: Outside of the Dalek or a Cyberman, I want to play as one of those Psychic Spiders from the older Dr. Who/Planet of Spiders.

Eight Legs

The Eight Legs, also spelt eight-legs, were a race of giant spiders with psychic powers. The Eight Legs were black spiders, generally less than a metre in length, though the Great One was much larger. They relied on human mounts for transport, though they could scuttle along at walking pace. The...

tardis.fandom.com

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Speaking for myself, and probably millions (or probably many thousands, since this is TTRPGs) of others, I have not had the time or energy or interest in learning a brand-new system for a long time, so something people are familiar with versus something else is a plus in my book. And Cubicle 7 has experience with this from when they were still publishing The One Ring and Adventures in Middle-Earth. AiME, the 5E OGL of ToR, sold massively more books than ToR. I expect to see the same thing with this, as long as it works and is not clunky. And the same will probably happen with the 5E OGL version of Victoriana that C7 will also be putting out this year.

You know part of why I’m excited about this is that it expands D&D, as well. The more people that realize you can have conflict without combat, or that you can run D&D in a modern or near modern setting with little adjustment, the better.

 

[Jer]

Hopefully the changes they made will be sufficient to more closely match the property. But judging from the character sheet, they’re mostly renaming stuff. Plot points instead of hit points. As an example. Retaining things like class and level is some big red flags for me.

I'm going to disagree here. The entire point of basing a game off of 5e - especially when it's a secondary game you're publishing alongside your real game - is to have a game that is recognizably 5e and plays similar enough to 5e to get the people who aren't buying your other game interested. If you aren't going to have classes and levels why use 5e as a base at all.

As with Adventures in Middle Earth, the point of this exercise has to be trying to get people who are interested in your setting but only play 5e to buy in. Once you have them either they'll be happy with the experience the 5e game gives them - in which case you have happy customers giving you money - or they feel like something is missing from the experience - in which case now they at least know your game exists and can think about giving it a shake.

 

[overgeeked]

I'm going to disagree here. The entire point of basing a game off of 5e - especially when it's a secondary game you're publishing alongside your real game - is to have a game that is recognizably 5e and plays similar enough to 5e to get the people who aren't buying your other game interested. If you aren't going to have classes and levels why use 5e as a base at all.

That bolded bit is telling. And I agree. The real game has been out for years and just got a 2nd Edition last year. This is a secondary game to appeal to 5E players who refuse to try anything but 5E. Which, unfortunately, is quite a lot of them...and, again, unfortunately, they dominate the industry. So if you want to make money in RPGs it's basically 5E or nothing. C7 already made the best game they could for Doctor Who. It's been out for years. It's not selling like they hope...so here we are.

As with Adventures in Middle Earth, the point of this exercise has to be trying to get people who are interested in your setting but only play 5e to buy in. Once you have them either they'll be happy with the experience the 5e game gives them - in which case you have happy customers giving you money - or they feel like something is missing from the experience - in which case now they at least know your game exists and can think about giving it a shake.

That's not generally how these things shake out. The company is stuck. They either change the setting to fit 5E or they change 5E to fit the setting. The whole point is to get 5E-only player sales...so changing 5E to match the setting is a non-starter. Which means they're left with changing the setting to fit the system. And when it comes to licensed properties...where the whole point of picking it up is the setting...that is also a non-starter.

C7's other licensed game with a 5E secondary game, TOR and AiME, is a good example. AiME wildly outsold TOR. Because the vast majority of people in the hobby right now want 5E. And that's it. 5E, only 5E, and nothing but 5E. Which is why when most people encountered AiME they looked it over, pulled out the journey rules, and went back to D&D 5E. And even with that little engagement, it still wildly outsold TOR.

I expect something similar here. There is likely some neat subsystem that C7 has devised that will be the killer app which people will hack out for parts and port into their D&D 5E games. Likely something to do with social interactions and/or talking your way out of fights. But that's not awesome for people who actually want to play Doctor Who. As I said before, I can't think of a worse system for playing anything like a Doctor Who story than 5E. I honestly hope I'm wrong and C7 has tore 5E down to the foundation and built it back up again to something that can actually work...but again...that character sheet along with class and level are huge red flags.

Who's going to want to play a 1st-level Companion when someone else at the table is playing a 20th-level Time Lord? I mean...look around the board. Every third thread is about power gaming, builds, min-maxing, optimization...hell, there are entire boards dedicated to it and there's a subforum for it here. It'll sell to collectors and people who want to hack out a few subsystems. I can't imagine a typical 5E player willingly accepting being a 1st-level nobody at all...to say nothing of being a 1st-level nobody in the same party as a 20th-level Time Lord. The idea is laughable.

 

[Weiley31]

Who's going to want to play a 1st-level Companion when someone else at the table is playing a 20th-level Time Lord?

Wait: in the original Dr. Who RPG by Cubicle 7, does the Time Lord character start at max level? Because if not, I don't know how you got the idea that the Time Lord PC auto starts at max level while all the Companions start at level 1 or level 3.

 

[overgeeked]

Wait: in the original Dr. Who RPG by Cubicle 7, does the Time Lord character start at max level? Because if not, I don't know how you got the idea that the Time Lord PC auto starts at max level while all the Companions start at level 1 or level 3.

Looking at the absolute mountain of extra stuff a Time Lord character can start with, yeah, that’s basically how it works. The Time Lord and Time Lord (Experienced) traits drop a pile of benefits in your lap. To say nothing of actually playing The Doctor when someone else has to play a companion. It’s a great system, but the point-buy character creation is kinda borked. This is from 1E. I have 2E but haven’t done a full read through yet.

 

[MichaelSomething]

If you can't beat'em; join'em!

 

[overgeeked]

If you can't beat'em; join'em!

Exactly. There were some great games that came out of the first wave of SRD/OGL products, but the era is not fondly remembered. It’s generally called the d20 glut. I get the feeling this era will be similarly remembered down the road, when the fad ends, and most of the new players fade away from the hobby, as the 5E glut.

 

[Von Ether]

It's been out for years. It's not selling like they hope...so here we are.

I haven't heard anything one way or another about C7's expectations on DW sales, so at first glance this statement could be an assumption. It could be a safe assumption because most games going on for 10 years have pretty much established all the audience they are going to get by that point. However ...

... the other way to look at it is that the company is leaving money on the table for not making a 5e DW game. No shame in having two game lines that are solid sellers.

In fact, we saw how D&D and Deadlands accidently cannibalized their markets by kicking out different settings with the same system. Doing the same game for two different systems might be a acceptable experiment with 5e these days.