Ian Marsh (3)

https://nwhyte.livejournal.com/3074926.html

My role-playing game days are very far behind me now, but in my late teens I was pretty absorbed in the linked fandoms of postal diplomacy and RPG design. One of the major figures of the latter was Ian Marsh, co-editor of the famous zine Dragonlords, solo editor of the less famous Year of the Rat, and briefly the professional editor of White Dwarf, which is of course still going. Ian himself now runs a tabletop miniatures business in the Isle of Wight. I only recently realised that he and Peter Darville-Evans, the original editor of Virgin’s New Adventures, had collaborated on this role-playing game. I am no longer enough of an RPG fan to really evaluate it; the points that struck me were:

* No time needed for players to roll up characters, because character sheets for the (then) seven Doctors and their companions are already provided and players are expected to use them.
* An interesting mechanism for invoking chance: the referee establishes the difficulty of a particular task on a scale of 0-5, and the player must then “beat the difference”, by rolling two dice and seeing if the difference between the two numbers exceeds the difficulty of the task.
* Quite a strong time element, in terms of how long particular activities will take mattering a lot to the outcome of your scenario, perhaps deliberately echoing the time pressure of a 25-minute TV episode.

There are also two skeleton stories provided, one of the Doctor and Ace intervening in high politics of a spacefaring planet, the other an alien mystery in a contemporary shopping centre. I think for completists only, whether Whovians or RPGers, but interesting enough. (Not so sure about Colin Howard’s art here though.) I got mine in hard copy, but you can download it here, and I believe that more adventures are available if you hunt around.… (más)