How do you make a Doctor Who game without the doctor ?

I really want to run a RPG session in the doctor who universe. The Show is really centered around the doctor but I want my players to be the hero of their own story and not just the doctor's companions.

What do to do ?

> Reddit: the Show
I would start by not running it.

>really centered around the doctor
Only NuWho.

Do something torchwood-ish maybe?

I'd run something either during the Time War, as UNIT, a UNIT offshoot (Always thought a foreign UNIT equivalent would be funky, something like a Taiwanese supernatural defence agency, but since nearly every country is part of the UN now, oh well. Unless you want to run Glorious Leader Kim And His Golden Fist Of Justice Against Space) or something akin to the episodes Love and Monsters / 42 / The Impossible Planet.

My fucking god how Young are you?

There are a lot of room for other heroes in the same universe, although an important thing to remember is that often, without The Doctors presence, the universe he exists in is a fucking awful place. Heck, even when he is around and manages to save the day, a hell of a lot of people fucking die basically every time he has to intervene in something.

Everyone is the doctor. They go around trying to out-doctor each other.

>how Young are you?
Why did you capitalize that?

I mean, if you want to have time travel, a central theme of the show, you've got to have someone or thing that can do it.

So yeah, you can make everyone timelords.

For emphasis.

I second this notion. You get to:
>Design your own chameleon circuit-malfunctioned TARDIS
>Choose an obnoxious profession as a title everyone must address you as
>Role play the title so hard it becomes ingrained as a staple word into every civilisation

Just do Torchwood, magic items are alien weapons and if desired you can always be sucked off to an alien planet/timeline or whatever

Railroad the fuck out of it so the players never lose, like the writers.

You've never watched any of the older series, have you.
Many, many, many people lose. The Doctor most of all.

Just slap a vortex manipulator or whatever on one of them, they're less prone to fucking up than the Tardis.

You basically don't.

>Woman he loved is trapped in another universe
>Donna will die if she ever remembers him
>Wife dies
>Girl he's known since she was a child gets trapped in the past
>Daughter is dead as far as he knows
>All memory of his most recent companion has been erased
>Never loses

He never loved Rose.

Earth's still here, Gallifrey turned out to be 100% OK, the Doctor's still alive, and Amy and Rory are only "trapped" if you're some kind of retard, because they can always move OUT of New York and meet up with the Doctor elsewhere just to visit.

Nothing the Doctor has 'lost' really matters anyway, at least not on an RPG campaign scale. He has personal losses, but he only loses battles. He wins every war.

The players stumble, by random accident, across a Tardis damaged in the time war, its crew killed off by some Dalek superweapon designed specifically to kill Time Lords.

The Tardis made an emergency landing and activated its chameleon circuit, successfully hiding itself until the players literally walk into it.

Because its damaged, every time they boot up the Tardis it tries to return to Gallifrey. However, Gallifrey doesn't exist anymore, so it gets confused and has to make another emergency landing somewhere else.

So you run a game with a 3 level plot.

The first is exploring the Tardis itself. Its huge on the inside, bigger than you would ever imagine. And large parts of it are in lockdown. But any room or hallway you explore in the Tardis is canon for your game forever after. Treat it like a dungeon you live in, and keep a map that you expand as time goes on.

The second is fixing up the Tardis whenever the chance presents itself. You are stuck without control on a series of random jumps throughout time and space. If you ever want to get control of the Tardis (either to make it back home or even just to control your own destiny) you need to fix this thing. This provides a long term goal to the players, and as they fix up different parts of the Tardis it gives you an excuse to 'unlock' new rooms or areas of the Tardis, providing new information, tools, or problems. Turns out one of the time lords left a sandwich in their room before they died. You thought the inside of your fridge looked bad after a month, try 2 million years and regular exposure to time radiation! Or you find a sonic screwdriver, but no instructions for how to use the damn thing. Try not to kill yourself with it!

The third level plot is the most obvious: episode of the week stuff. You land on a new planet, in a new time. The Tardis sometimes takes a while to recharge, so you might as well explore and see if you can find any new parts out there. Doctor Who stuff.

Of course, the fact that you have a Tardis is going to make you a target eventually. At some point, someone who knows just how valuable that machines is will try and take it from you. Hopefully by then you know enough about the Tardis, and perhaps its unique dangers, to defend it from attack. Like, say, opening that door you all promised never to go near again on deck 12, and let the pirates deal with that fucking Rock Monster.

One shot's or Unit are your best bets, fluffing up some star travelers wouldn't be too bad though

Oh, and as a side note: this campaign setup (because its so episodic) might even lend itself to round robin style GMing. Which is to say, each 'episode' is GMed by a different person, and everyone goes around and takes turn telling adventures. Episode doesn't necessarily equal session, but just swap out GMs every time you go to a new planet unless you are dealing with a problem that can follow you.

Like Doctor Who itself, if any GM introduces something that is pure wank or creates more problems than it solves? Just make it a dropped plot point. The antimatter gun was too powerful, put it to a vote and it never comes up again.

>Everyone is the doctor. They go around trying to out-doctor each other.

That may work. Give the players a tardis, and have them murderhobo their way through the cosmos. Throw daleks and cybermen at them, have them bond with people, and then have them leave and abandon the lot.

Sliders would make a better setting, though.

Another way to play it is to go ahead and let one person be the Doctor and the other players be the companions, and then switch up who plays the Doctor each time. Pass him around, basically. Suddenly, you've got a character whose personality grows out of the group.

I don't see how you can. I was a whovian all the way back to the early 80's, and love nuWho as well.

The issues are that you don't have a consistent continuity within the universe, and that the whole setting revolves around one uber-NPC. It's a great show and a fun setting for fiction, but from a gaming perspective it just doesn't work unless you put limits on the setting that make it just not really Doctor Who any more.

Oh my god this is so good my heart hurts.

>UNIT
>Torchwood
>Sarah Jane Chronicles
>FHD Foreign Hazard Division
>Time agents
>A Victorian lady, a big game hunter, a Neanderthal butler and an alien experiment find an ancient stone space ship powered by imagination
>Random civilians fall ass backwards into an adventure

So many ways to explore the Doctors universe without involving the Doctor at all

Lost the time war

>It's a great show and a fun setting for fiction, but from a gaming perspective it just doesn't work unless you put limits on the setting that make it just not really Doctor Who any more.
This. Way back in the day, I got the FASA Doctor Who Role-Playing Game: Adventures Through Time and Space (not to be confused with the newer Doctor Who: Adventures IN Time and Space RPG) thinking that because I thought Doctor Who was awesome, playing an RPG based on it would be as well. It really wasn't. It's either way too forced and derivative, or it was removed enough that there really wasn't any point in it being in the Doctor Who universe anymore (since, while it has cool aspects, it isn't really consistent and doesn't really hold up on its own, making it a better source for ideas than as an iron-clad setting, at least once you remove the Doctor).

>I... love nuWho as well.
I'm on hiatus. I only watched a few episodes of the last season and I'm skipping the next one as well. It's turned into something that I'm really not interested in and I'm hoping that will change once Moffat's gone. Moffat's did some great stories under Davies, but despite season 5 being really good, I'm not a fan of Moffat as a show-runner overall, and dislike the direction the show has taken. It often feels like the adventures, themselves, only serve as backdrops for relationship dramas and oh-so-clever plot twists.

I ran my Doctor Who RPG in a way reminicent of the scooby doo movies. You know, set up a mystery whoch is actually true enough, even if nowhere near being the being you expect it be behind it (You expect a werewolf and get a va mpire skrt of thing). In the end Doctor Who tends to be scooby doo often enough that the formula rarely fails.

No he didn't, Gallifrey is fine. The Time Lords WON.

Check out continuum. It's difficult to wrap your head around but its a game of time and space travellers fighting others of their society. Insanely cool concept. Insanely weird mechanics.

>I'm hoping that will change once Moffat's gone
Bad news, buddy, they're looking to do an overhaul of the series mostly for the sake of merchandizing shit pretty soon. Basically seems like they want to recapture the Tennant years from what I've read.

Vestra, Jenny, and Strax are effectively a time-travelling RPG group in themselves, with Strax's player being unfortunate enough to play a fighter build in a system where fighting is a tetriary feature at best.

UNIT seemed like it became a global organisation at some point after the end of the old series but before the new season 4 finale where it seemed to have been wiped out. And since then it seems to have been rebuilt for just Britain (except when it doesn't...).

At the very least its hella inconsistent, so you could probably get away with it being the Whoniverse equivalent of S.H.I.E.L.D. if you wanted.

Torchwood

A horribly depressing adventure doomed to failure because nothing in the Dr Who universe can end well if The Doctor isn't involved.

Either

A. Have your characters stumble upon the Tardis with notes and other things that imply that he's dead, along with other things such as hints of who is responsible or what to do.

B. Have the characters encounter other time travelling forces, and fnagle it so that eventually they get to take that same method of time travel.

You can do it without time travel at all. Just use a few mysteries with the Dr.'s aliens showing up. Or humans using stolen tech from something the Doctor once defeated.

As for who won the time war... Depends on which point in the the time loop/break that you are focused on.

All three sides won and lost. ( Keeping in mind the Doctor is his own side.) Just depends on which run through you are on.

I ran the official Doctor Who rpg for a while, with the Doc as an NPC. One big thing I did was just have him get knocked out, go into a tizzy, get captured, or be busy working on some wacky invention whenever the really cool stuff was happening. It's one of the few games where splitting the party is not just okay, but encouraged, so a lot of the time the Companions will be the ones in key positions to affect the plot while the Doctor is dicking around in the TARDIS or something.

Also, remember that in NuWho especially the Companions are the Doc's conscience. It's totally fine to have the key moment of an adventure be "convince the Doc to do X instead of Y".