Chief Technical Officer
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I have to admit to finding the adventure book the product's weakest point. I wasn't even all that keen on the mini plot seeds, as a inordinately high percentage of them are focused around people mysteriously going missing.
I think the weak adventures are especially unfortunate, as this particular product seems like a great way to get some younger folks into the hobby, but most of that potential audience isn't going to have the ability to make up their own adventures to the degree that's required. I really hope they do some seriously fleshed out plug-and-play adventures soon.
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Chief Technical Officer
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I'm still waiting for my copy to ship with my next subscription, so this might be really obvious from the set itself, but how hard would it be to adapt one of the television stories or books to an adventure?
If I were going to run it, I'd totally do it by adapting one of the novels. (Actually, I'd probably adapt one of the Torchwood novels.)
RPG Superstar 2009 Top 32
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I'm still waiting for my copy to ship with my next subscription, so this might be really obvious from the set itself, but how hard would it be to adapt one of the television stories or books to an adventure?If I were going to run it, I'd totally do it by adapting one of the novels. (Actually, I'd probably adapt one of the Torchwood novels.)
Oh Vic... please say you'll run a Torchwood focused PbP. :D
You know... somewhere in that extra 25th hour you have up your sleve... ;)
Well, now that I've run my one-shot, I can say that the system itself works fantastically. Very intuitive, and difficulties seem to be set just right. Very easy to come up with die roll checks on the fly, and since it's a cinematic system it's easy to run fast and loose with what you've got there. LOVE the story points, and the players grasped how they worked very quickly (to be fair, they're familiar with the similar Fate Points from <i>Spirit of the Century</i>).
My only stopping point was that the base mechanic is Attribute + Skill + 2d6, but the adventures in some places wanted you to roll two Attributes together instead; particularly, there isn't a good Attribute + Skill you can do for general "Perception" checks. But so as not to confuse the system, I decided Perception Checks were Awareness + appropriate stat -- so if you're trying to notice someone attacking you, Awareness + Fighting; if you're trying to notice something's physically wrong with someone, Awareness + Medicine, etc.
Amongst my players were two players who weren't familiar with Doctor Who but being sci-fi and pulp adventure fans, they got into the scene and situation right away and enjoyed themselves.
I did use the plot hooks and NPCs in Judoom and fleshed a lot of it out myself for the adventure and that worked, but the adventure as written was as much a hindrance as an idea-source (see my previous post). And lack of map really did actually hurt my response time, because the players wanted to know where different rooms were in relation to each other which was actually kind of important. I came up with something on the fly, but it would have been nice to just look at a picture and say so and move on rather than pause and try to make a sensible guess (and remember the call that I made later on).
I'm still waiting for my copy to ship with my next subscription, so this might be really obvious from the set itself, but how hard would it be to adapt one of the television stories or books to an adventure?
Not too hard, I don't think. What I would do is take the main situation, major NPCs (stat them up, which won't take long), and sketch out the main important areas. Nice thing about Doctor Who stories is that the hooks most of the stories have basically pretty much are great RP adventure hooks.
The books tend to advise the GM to railroad the players when they're not following "the script" of the story, but I would try to find points in the story where players might act differently than they did in the publish story so as to be aware of possible other outcomes and consequences.
