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Post by vengersatanis on May 19, 2014 14:05:43 GMT -6
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Post by The Semi-Retired Gamer on May 26, 2014 13:19:50 GMT -6
Doctor Who has a ton of stuff that can be lifted. Some will thumb their nose at the production values of classic Who but it's a fantastic spectacle to watch! |
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paulg
Level 3 Conjurer
Posts: 75
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Post by paulg on May 26, 2014 17:33:09 GMT -6
Doctor Who is one of my big D&D influences, particularly the cheesy rubber mask alien villains. Almost all the evil plot are easy to drop into a D&D campaign.
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Post by Falconer on May 26, 2014 21:07:57 GMT -6
Yeah, I loved “The Keys of Marinus,” check out my recap here (and T. Foster’s comment below it, too). Very D&Dish, indeed, and would make for a great module! |
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Post by xerxez on Jun 11, 2014 22:16:43 GMT -6
My fiancé introduced me to the new show, though as a teen I thoroughly enjoyed staying up to watch the Tom Baker episodes. I get tons of ideas from watching the shows, most especially from the alien races. I thought the episode with the multi-eyed spider woman hybrid presented a perfect interpretation of Lolth, Queen of the Demon Web Pits, and I can't help but believe that someone who worked on that episode played some Greyhawk AD&D. That creature in that Dr. Who episode actually successfully creeped me out, and TV seldom does that to me....usually takes some old horror movies like the Shining or the Prophecy.
It was after watching Dr. Who with my girl that I decided to add a time travel element to my campaign--it has been running for a full year now and I felt it needed something different so I had the party time travel within the setting by means of an ancient barrow. A certain relic is needed to let the forces of healy goodness prevail, but the relic has been destroyed--ah, no problem--just travel back in time and get it before it was destroyed--it is turning out to be fun, confusing, and unpredictable and it would not have happened had I not been watching the series. David Tennat is great, by the way.
Nice blog and that's some great stuff Vengersatanis!
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Post by xerxez on Jun 11, 2014 22:24:30 GMT -6
Doctor Who has a ton of stuff that can be lifted. Some will thumb their nose at the production values of classic Who but it's a fantastic spectacle to watch! The production value of this series...especially the old ones...is one of the things I LOVE about it, S.R.G. But then, besides loving Star trek TOS, I totally dig sci fi and horror cheese classics! Especially the old Hammer horror and the like! |
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Post by The Semi-Retired Gamer on Jun 12, 2014 4:16:01 GMT -6
YES! The production values of the old shows is part of the draw. You just touched on my favorites with Star Trek TOS, hammer horror, and cheesy sci-fi and horror flicks. In a perfect world there's a TV channel that plays all of that stuff 24/7!
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Post by vengersatanis on Jun 25, 2014 12:12:14 GMT -6
Thanks, guys. I just finished watching The Seeds of Doom with Tom Baker. Very period, vintage, 70's gothic. Might do a blog post about that one as it's a favorite of mine.
VS
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Koren n'Rhys
Level 6 Magician
Got your mirrorshades?
Posts: 355
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Post by Koren n'Rhys on Jun 25, 2014 13:08:11 GMT -6
I watched some of the old Tom Baker stuff back in the day, but even the new ones (my kids watch) are a bit on the cheesy side for my tastes now-a-days. Same goes for Star Trek. I watched TOS as a kid, but really prefer TNG.
That said, the Angels are creepy as hell and I want to find a way to work them into my games.
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Post by scottenkainen on Jun 25, 2014 16:21:10 GMT -6
Would it not be thread hijacking too much to ask if anyone here has run a Doctor Who campaign? I was talking to the Mrs. about running such a campaign for her once, but I cannot see how you would run such a campaign without railroading (and, in fact, the one time I ever played the Doctor Who RPG at GaryCon was the worst case of railroading I've ever seen in my life).
How would you possibly set up a sandbox-type campaign if all of time and space was available to your players?
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Post by Stormcrow on Jun 26, 2014 6:06:57 GMT -6
I run the occasional game of Doctor Who: Adventures in Time and Space.If you're running a Doctor Who game with the Doctor and companions, you don't run a sandbox campaign. You shouldn't railroad, either. The GM chooses where the TARDIS lands, he sets up the background, the non-player characters, and the locations, and then he lets the player characters loose to deal with the situation however they want. Once they resolve the situation, the game is over; next time will be something different. When I write a Doctor Who adventure, I create the above, but I usually have no idea how the players can win. I leave that up to them. For instance, I recently ran a game in which the Daleks were searching for a gadget of theirs that had fallen through the Vortex and landed in Dark Ages Britain. The purpose of the gadget was to mutate humans its victims into powerful and obedient (to the Daleks) monsters. The player characters found the gadget but were trapped in a church surrounded by Daleks. They eventually hit on a plan to modify the gadget to send out a pulse that would render the Daleks too depressed to function (they were obviously thinking of the Point of View Gun from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy movie). This worked, although a depressed Dalek turned out simply to be one that took no actions. This solution was something I hadn't even remotely considered. You can set up a matrix-style campaign, where there's an overarching plot. The characters may choose where to go next in that plot, but they generally choose between a number of predetermined choices. If in "Keys of Marinus," or the Key to Time series, the Doctor and companions had had their choice of order of which keys to go after, that would be a matrix campaign. (As they are, they're both fairly linear campaigns.) I posed this very question once on the DWATS boards in the form of a poll. Here are the results. Read the responses too, because some of the responders didn't understand my poll choices and voted incorrectly. |
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Post by Stormcrow on Jun 26, 2014 7:23:02 GMT -6
IIRC for a period of time the TARDIS wasn't the most reliable of timeships and didn't always end up where the Doctor wanted it to go. Quite true, but this doesn't allow for a sandbox campaign. Yes, after the Key to Time series the Doctor installed a randomizer so the Black Guardian couldn't find them and take revenge. Randomizers and unreliable controls are just devices to let writers place the adventure wherever they want, rather than where the characters want to be. This is the opposite of a sandbox, but very suitable for Doctor Who. Even when the Doctor has control, he often doesn't try to land anyplace in particular. For the most part, the TARDIS is just a means of getting the characters to the adventure. (But see The Time Traveller's Companion for good rules on using your TARDIS during adventures. I usually ignore these; the most my players ever want out of their TARDIS during adventures is to make short hops—"very tricky"—and to hide in when they're surrounded by monsters.) But remember that there's a difference between going on the adventure the GM tells you to and riding a railroad. In the former you can do anything you want as long as you stay in that adventure. On a railroad you are guided inexorably toward taking those actions the tracks want you to take. |
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