Doctor Who Christmas Special: Telling a Story in Roleplaying

I've noted before that Doctor Who: Adventures In Time and Space is, in comparison to other role-playing systems, very plot-heavy. The exciting finale of a Doctor Who story is usually a character crisis, rather than a "boss" to be defeated in classic roleplaying rounds of physical combat.

This leads to a rather unusual dilemma. As a GM, how much can you script plot and outcomes, when what you really want is to allow the players to feel that they are roleplaying towards an ending that they have created themselves? This question became even more pertinent during our own Alternative Doctor Who Christmas Special game.

That is, after all the beauty of pen-and-paper roleplaying. At the beginning of October, I wrote this letter to Edge Magazine:

What I think pen-and-paper gaming offers over videogaming - as technology currently stands - is that the direction the game takes, the places journeyed to, the characters met and the adventures had, is entirely the result of an organic agreement between the players and the Gamemaster ... There is no detailed plot design up-front, because there is no guarantee that the players will act in the "right" way to follow the plot. Furthermore if a GM really needs to steer wandering players back on track, this can be achieved with natural narrative methods, rather than an invisible wall

I tend not to prepare too much detail in my plots. I have a basic structure and a few ways I can imagine the story resolving. At one point, my comparatively inexperienced players were looking to me for helpful hints to resolve the situation, but I told them, "oh I haven't actually written a way out of this problem! I'm just waiting to see what solutions you come up with."

But, the few dramatic moments that I do prepare are generally essential for the ongoing story or campaign and it's hard to know how much is "too much" when providing GM-controlled narrative. In the penultimate game before the Alternative Doctor Who Christmas Special, I really wanted the players to meet the villain face-to-face, because it would reveal that The Doctor is already known by the enemy and that his arrival was expected. In an alternative-history Nazi occupation, that should set some alarm bells ringing for players and characters alike.

However, I had real trouble getting the players to this scenario. Firstly, a senior NPC summons the players to report (since they were in disguise as soldiers at this point). Assuming (correctly) that they would get rumbled, they opted to abscond and decided that driving the nearby fuel tanker into the castle and detonating it would be a good ploy. They proceeded to hijack the truck and began driving it. I brought four armed troopers out to arrest them. They decided not to submit.

The Doctor (who, in this game, has Telekinesis) rolled a nearby petrol barrel at the guards and succeeded in knocking them down. The other player hit the gas and tried to run over the remaining soldier. A couple of soldiers managed to recover their wits and a: fired on the player in the drivers' seat, taking off about 50% health and b: shot out the front tyre on the truck, forcing a crash. Even after that, the players were still up for a scrap.

 

Players generally cannot resist barrels

In the end, I narrated the approach of even more soldiers, alerted by the sounds of shouting and gunfire. I try hard to avoid narrating any action or event that takes control away from the players. This approach involves introducing seemingly unstoppable odds that leave the players with little choice.

In the Alternative Doctor Who Christmas Special, I had a situation in which the two Doctors ended up strapped into chairs in twin machines, as part of a Dalek plan to eradicate all versions of the Doctor. The players had, thankfully, split into two parties so I had them where I wanted them, so to speak. In the end, once each Doctor was near the chair, I narrated that the Doctor was pulled, suddenly and irresistibly into the seat. Within the Doctor Who: Adventures in Time & Space system I could have easily made this action a forced mental attack, resisted by the player characters Resolve and Ingenuity or Presence.

But had the resistance been successful it would have robbed the players of the dramatic ending and the revelation of the Dalek's master plan. In this case, I felt it was better to present the Doctor's entrapment as a situation for the players to work out how to resolve, rather than an attack in itself which the player would try to resist.

It's always a tricky balance. Usually I don't worry too much if the stories don't resolve the way I had expected. Where I do come unstuck is that I like to drop little foreshadowing hints for each player about bits of plot that will affect them in later adventures, but sometimes you just need the players to walk into things.

The Christmas Special, however, required some extra handling: I needed a plot that explained why I had two (very different) first-generation Doctors at the same time and why Brigadier Lethbridge Stewart didn't recognise either of them. Therefore the ending was largely fixed, I just needed to find a subtly way to guide the players to it in a satisfactory way.

In the end, the biggest problem was the need to wrap the story up in a single session. Usually I can just wait for a suitable cliffhanger and then cue the music (which I do actually play!) but because the group of players and the scenario were unique for the Christmas Special, I had to get the stories resolved and both Doctors back to their own dimensions.

All the players seemed to have a good time though, which was the most important thing. I worry sometimes that guiding the story too much might make it feel less like a game and more like storytime, but I think so far the balance seems to be working.

Alternative Doctor Who Christmas Special, RPG-style

Not had the chance to blog for a while, due to holidays and other awesome things, but rest assured that work is progressing on the continuation of the Nazi-robot epic, Das Metallreich, and the new episodes of the ongoing game campaign with The Doctor, Esther, Lim, Stephen and Knute, which I'm calling "War and Peacehaven".

There's been some discussion in the games about an RPG Christmas special for our respective game-Doctors. The idea is to try and get a date where we can play and one-off, one-day adventure special, crossing over the timelines of both Doctors and producing an epic and seasonal adventure! This is a great opportunity to invite some other friends who might not want to play the game every couple of weeks, but are up for a "taste" of tabletop roleplaying.

 

May or may not be representative of included plot

Plans are in process, but in the meantime, here is the plot setup I've distributed to the invitees...

North Pole, 1977

'Twas the night before Christmas and all through Plaisted Station
not a creature was stirring...

Apart from Brigadier Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart and a team of U.N.I.T. troops. Lethbridge-Stewart has been dragged out of retirement after only a year and he isn't happy about it.

He's unhappy that Dr. Giddings, who has requested him personally, keeps ranting about Alien interference in his experiments. He's unhappy that they appear to be investigating the wrong Pole. He's unhappy that he's had to fly out to the Polar Scientific Research Station "Plaisted" on Christmas Eve.

Finally, he's particularly unhappy that a freak snowstorm is likely to leave them cut-off until New Year...

Andromeda Sector, Far Future

War has raged throughout the sector between the Independent Colonies and the Great Empire.

When an Independent Dreadnought is left drifting after a major conflict, the surviving crew release an S.O.S., while Imperial Intelligence receive a tip off that the ship may contain information vital to the war effort.

Ransacking a ship with survivors is against the articles of war, but the Empire have no wish to lose face or the war. Luckily there are plenty of mercenaries for hire who can murder the survivors and retrieve the information without ever implicating the Great Empire...

ROME: ?BC

The dominance of the Roman war machine is felt throughout known civilisation. Rome is expanding, by conquest and by influence. It is a time of great superstition but also promising great progress and technological advancement.

Into this world comes a fearsome creature of terrifying proportions, laying waste to whole settlements and slaughtering the inhabitants.

The people wait for a saviour: born of a virgin on December 25th. They wait for a god to free them from their terror. They wait for a warrior to protect them from The Beast. They wait for Mithras...


Meanwhile, The Doctors have been plucked out of their existing travels and pulled into a twisted and macabre plan of the most terrifying and deadly scope...

Maintaining the Mystery in Doctor Who Roleplay

One of the areas where I'm trying to learn, in being a newbie Gamesmaster, is how to give the players an entertaining ride through the plot. Good stories and mysterious situations are the backbone of Doctor Who. Doctor Who is less of a medium which allows you to send your player characters off on a quest to kill a particularly feared beast; in this instance the Doctor is just as likely to uncover a reason why the "evil" beast is, in fact, a victim of the ignorance and double-standards of the terrified villagers.

Like any fiction media, the ideal with any plot exposition is to give away enough plot pointers that the audience can "realise" the plot before it is fully revealed (with the exception of twists, which should generally be fair, i.e. not out of the blue and unprecedented but at the same time unpredictable).

However, the main difference between written narrative and a roleplaying adventure, is that the main characters are the players. In passive fiction, like film, tv, theatre and books, nothing is lost if the audience guesses the plot before the characters. The characters will still go through their own journey to realise it for themselves and this is satisfying to watch. That's why in passive fiction it is possible to show scenes in which the main characters are not involved. We can witness the villain, or traitor or incoming doom without the protagonists being aware of the events the audience have seen.

The Matrix. A much shorter movie if the others had seen the scene where Cipher and Smith started dating.

Player characters, however, are aware of everything that the GM has revealed. The Doctor Who: Adventures in Time and Space Gamesmaster guide refers to this as "meta-gaming." This is where the players bring information to their character which they know from being participants in the wider game. What this means is that player characters will not blindly stumble towards their fate in the same way as fictional characters in passive stories.

The ideal is obviously for people to role-play characters in such away that they appear not to know this information. But this is unrealistic. Tabletop games bring together a group of players who are working together to survive challenges and defeat scenarios. It must be assumed that any information one character knows, all the others have access to that information. They have, after all, heard the GM say it. The only alternative I see is handing out written notes to each player, classroom-flirting style.

The other reality to accept is that players will unearth narrative twists faster than characters in traditional media. Modern audiences will usually be looking for the pointers which hints towards twists and outcomes. There are lots of reasons for this I won't go into right now, but suffice it to say that if you present players with an apparently harmless situation, they won't believe it. They won't write oddities off to coincidence, the way TV characters will. Every peaceful village will be assumed to have a human sacrifice at the weekends. Scientific Research Bases will always be working on a new armageddon virus alongside, say, slightly more effective home pregnancy tests. That nice caretaker who let you into the private area? Bound to be being controlled by a psychotic alien host.

The point really is that audiences and players aren't stupid. Writers usually assume they are, which is why so much TV is predictable. The other point is not to get too attached to how clever our plots are. Until I've mastered the art of maintaining mystery until a big reveal, I have to assume that with one game of five players and a second game of three players, one of them is bound to guess the twist.

And what one player knows, they all know...

Can I hit players harder? Can they take it?

I GM'd my 3rd game with Doctor Who: Adventures in Time and Space: The Roleplaying Game last night. This was Game A's second session, bringing their first adventure - chasing militant Silurians through the British Museum - to a conclusion. (You can read a narrative account of their first session's adventures here).

There are a few things that are hard to gauge, being a newbie GM. It's hard to know how hard to stat the NPCs (non-player characters); it's hard to know how oblique to make the puzzles; it's hard to judge how determined the enemy are to pummel the Player Characters into liquid-storage component parts.

But, Game A's group managed to get through the entire adventure without taking a single point of real damage. Not only that, but by the end of the adventure they had used very few Story Points. In Adventures in Time and Space: The RPG, Story Points are the players' way to alter game events which would harm their character or to turn things in their favour. They can be used to reduce damage, avoid death, reveal clues, or even add plot events so dramatic it changes the whole outcome of the plot.

Must have run out of "Adventures in Time and Space" Story Points.

This is down to a number of factors.

• 2 of the characters hid behind cover for the duration of a battle. A legitimate character choice.
• The group settled very nicely into the "Doctor Who" way of resolving conflict, many of them trying to talk their enemies down rather than fighting them, or using clever elements of the environment to take them down.
• I had given the NPCs a lower number of points and skills than the players.

The first two are fair enough and exactly what I would have hoped from the game. The last one troubles me, because it's the bit that is down to my judgement. My own experience of dramatic encounters - as a player - is that it's more exciting to escape or win a battle by the skin of your teeth than it is to walk all over an incompetent enemy. Based on my experiences last night, it can actually be quite hard to hit a player character with a monster and do them real harm.

A surprisingly easy situation for a player to get out of.

Of course it's easy to tip the balance in the wrong direction. Despite the iconic nature of Daleks as a Doctor Who enemy (for what incarnation of The Doctor feels truly complete without a dust-up against the xenophobic tin-cans?) the source book gives each Dalek 10 points of armour and a weapon with does insta-death damage on a good or better hit. How many would I pit them against? One? One each? A battalion? I don't want to end up wiping out the player party, just to test the theory!

But, I think the last adventure shows that there is plenty of scope for putting the players in enough peril that they are forced to rely on story points to survive. After all, if they don't have to use them then there is no impetus to earn them. As the overall GM and narrator, I can of course intervene to avoid a total party kill; but it would be nice to put them in some real danger. Game A is a very big group. With 5 players they have a combined Story Point total of 56. Plenty of scope for a sound thrashing!

Total destruction of the Tardis and occupants. Nowhere near as hard to survive as it looks.

My first Doctor Who game(s) and thoughts about group sizes

...vworp vworp...

One of my main concerns leading up to the game was a thought about group size.

As I may have already suggested, the Doctor Who: Adventures in Time and Space roleplaying game seems to centre much more around creating complex narrative, plot and character events than it does around battle, levelling or growing the character's skills. Much of the challenge I see facing me as a newbie GM is in finding ways for the player characters to grow and develop over time through plot-related enhancements or disablements (for example, picking up a horrible phobia as a result of a particularly terrifying ordeal, or gaining telepathy through exposure to some Alien technology.

I have two groups running. One is a set of five players, making up The Doctor and four assistants. The other is a set of three players, with The Doctor and two assistants. I had worries about how the larger group would function, narratively. Partly down to this issue of providing focus on each character through narrative and also down to the historical issue of multiple companions in Doctor Who's history.

During Peter Davison's time as The Doctor, he found himself with three companions. Nyssa, Tegan and Adric. It's generally accepted that this was too many and that, half the time, one of the companions got left behind in the Tardis or written out to avoid overcomplicating the plot.

Having said that, Big Finish have successfully produced great audio dramas featuring the Fifth Doctor with Nyssa, Tegan and Turlough (perhaps it's just the Adric "sucking" factor).

Adric. Quite possibly the cause of all Suck in the universe.

But how does this relate to my fears over running a tabletop game? I'm keen for each of the players to be abe to contribute in an adventure. Using their skills, getting a bit of personal plot - these are the things I'd find rewarding as a player. It would be dreadful to have an adventure where a companion is just so much baggage. The other challenge is that the way to manage a multi-character Doctor Who story is to split up the party and have different action in different places.

This approach seemed like an advanced skill for a GM and not something I really wanted to take on too soon. However, it actually came pretty naturally. During an initial monster chase, the more fighty characters set off after the figure in the dark, while the investigative characters stayed behind to unlock a bit more of the mystery.

In fact, despite my concerns over five players being an over-large group, for Doctor Who purposes, it actually worked very well. It made it easier to split the party for a short while, since each player still had at least one other player to bounce off and it allowed for building up to a quite natural, multi-narrative cliffhanger.

All of which was supposed to be brought to a thrilling climax by me suddenly playing the Doctor Who theme tune. It would have been a great moment had I not accidentally clicked the Sonic Screwdriver sound effect instead...

...vworp vworp...

My very first foray into being a Game Master - Doctor Who

...vworp vworp vworp...

I'm actually something of a latecomer with tabletop gaming. I've played maybe 1 or 2 game sessions throughout my entire life to date. At 34 years old and an avid video gamer for life, it's something of a surprise to find how much I've been missing.

Perhaps it's a reaction to how limiting video gaming can be at times. Invisible walls blocking true exploration and solutions limited by the imagination and budget of the designer. A good tabletop roleplaying game does away with all of this and allows the players to explore any option that comes into their head, with only the goodwill of the GM and the roll of the Dice determining success.

Ever since taking up the hobby, with regular and excellent sessions courtesy of the hospitality of the Grumpy GM (http://sefotron.blogspot.co.uk/) I began to feel how much I would enjoy playing a game within the Doctor Who universe and how much I would enjoy being the GM and narrator, creating the world for others to explore. I am, after all, a writer and entertainer and finding the elements which keep an audience happy are my most divine pleasure. The world of Doctor Who is also a great love of mine, in both the classic and modern TV versions and particularly the excellent audio adventures created by the geniuses at Big Finish (http://bigfinish.com/hubs/v/doctor-who). My hope is that, like the radio versions, the tabletop version will have limitless vistas and flawless special effects, since it all takes place in the players' heads...

I had been thinking for a while about how I would construct a set of game rules which would adequately allow for the scope of all the extended world of Doctor Who. I then came across the "Doctor Who Adventures in Time and Space: The Roleplaying Game." (http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/0857440381/ref=oh_details_o00_s00_i00) This seemed perfect for the job on the surface.

Upon reading the Gamesmaster guide, I became a little concerned. Compared to the comprehensive and decades-tested system of Dungeons and Dragons - in all its guises - the Doctor Who ATS seemed extremely lightweight. Only in its second edition it seems to be rife with contradictions and vagueness and falls a little too heavily into suggesting how the content of the game should manifest, rather than sticking to the rules.

But, undeterred - as I can see the potential brilliance and flexibility in the system - I have set about creating a couple of game sessions with friends to see how well it plays. Over the next few weeks I will have a good idea about how well it can work. Or at least how well I can bend the rules to our collective entertainment.

We have already run one successful session, creating and bringing together the first player party - but I'll share more of that another day...

...vworp vworp vworp...