There are books on my shelf that say something noble about my taste and discernment. Then there are the others. Doctors & Daleks belongs to the latter category: the sort of purchase that clearly involved a momentary lapse of judgment, a credit card, and the words “5E” and “Doctor Who” in unwise proximity.
By the time the PDFs and hardbacks appeared, my relationship with both had shifted. I’d completely drifted away from 5E, fallen even more deeply into horror and investigation systems, and my enthusiasm for the TV series had gone from “must watch live” to “I’ll get around to it, possibly never.” It was a bit like coming home from a long holiday as a vegetarian and finding a box of frozen steaks in the freezer, thoughtfully left by your earlier self.
The awkward part is that I already own a very good Doctor Who RPG. Cubicle 7’s Doctor Who: The Roleplaying Game 2nd Edition (the Vortex system) is purpose-built for the show. The core roll is 2d6 plus Attribute plus Skill, compared to a difficulty, and results fall across a neat track from Disastrous through Success to Brilliant. You don’t have to calculate much; you just glance at the outcome and narrate something suitably televisual. Story Points are there to bend reality: you survive things you shouldn’t, retroactively pack the right gadget, or nudge a disaster into a narrow escape. Fights are just another form of conflict, and “losing” usually means you’re captured, separated, or in worse trouble emotionally rather than lying in a pool of your own hit points. It feels like Doctor Who.
Doctors & Daleks is aimed at a different crowd: those whose hands start shaking if they have to roll anything that isn’t a d20. It takes the 5E SRD and leans on it hard. Underneath the BBC logos it is unquestionably 5E: ability scores, classes, levels, AC, initiative, the lot. Cubicle 7 know full well that “D&D in space” is not Doctor Who, so they’ve done a respectable job of pulling the chassis in a different direction.
Hit points become Plot Points, standing in for luck, resolve and narrative protection as much as bodily injury. Taking a “hit” might mean you’ve lost your nerve, your footing, or your faith in the Daleks’ ability to negotiate, rather than taking a sword in the kidney. Damage can be Physical, Emotional, or Logical; you can defeat a villain by out-arguing them until their Plot Points run out. Characters get Quips instead of spells: special tricks, clever lines, and cinematic flourishes keyed to their archetype.
So your “powers” are more about being interesting than about setting things on fire. Classes are built around talking, tinkering and protecting others rather than stabbing. Conflict scenes are branded as Encounters to emphasise that they’re about tension that may, sadly, involve lasers, not tactical slaughter as a first resort.
If you like 5E, it’s an impressively thoughtful re-skin. If you don’t, you can feel the familiar bones every time you turn a page. There is still initiative. There are still actions, bonus actions and reactions. There are still levels and advancement schedules and the sense that your sheet will grow longer, not shorter, as the campaign proceeds. You can rename hit points all you like; the table habits remain. Players will still look at their Quips, weigh up whether to use one as an “encounter power”, and ask how much “damage” their stirring speech does.
The supporting books don’t really change that impression. The Keys of Scaravore is a four-part mini-campaign that is, structurally, a Doctor Who series arc. You jaunt across eras, uncovering the influence of an ancient psychic entity meddling in prehistory, the Old West, a space colony and modern London. Each episode has a strong hook and the right mix of infiltration, social scenes and set-piece peril. As a piece of Doctor Who fan service, it’s perfectly decent.
It is also undeniably a 5E adventure path. Encounters are calibrated around level bands; antagonists are statted up in full; there’s an expected party size, an assumed curve of advancement, and the quiet but ever-present expectation that, at some point, things will go pear-shaped and you will roll for initiative. You could swap out “Dalek” for “necromancer” and “psychic scar” for “cursed artefact” and, mechanically, very little would change.
The Alien Archive is the same story in bestiary form. Daleks, Cybermen, Zygons, Ice Warriors. They’re all here, presented as 5E stat blocks with appropriate traits, resistances and gadgetry. There are some neat touches: tech levels to show how out of their depth Bronze Age peasants are with a sonic blaster, and Logical or Emotional attacks built into alien abilities to reflect mind games as much as ray guns. As a toolset for someone happily running Doctors & Daleks, it does its job. As someone who increasingly writes “this monster cannot be harmed by your gun, please don’t try” in the margin of other games, the idea of another stack of 5E stat blocks fills me with a certain existential fatigue.
There is also the elephant in the room: the show itself. When the 2005 revival was fresh, it practically wrote game hooks for you. Even mediocre episodes had some striking image or idea you could shamelessly nick. In the last few years, that engine has spluttered. The Chibnall era with the Thirteenth Doctor staggered under increasingly messy arcs and the infamous Timeless Child retcon, which landed somewhere between “bold reimagining” and “setting fire to the lore cupboard” depending on your tolerance. I watched that episode and, instead of reaching for my notebook, reached for a cup of tea and the vague sense that we’d all been through something we’d prefer not to discuss.
The current, shinier Disney-funded run under returning Russell T Davies has not really solved the problem for me. The budget is clearly on screen. Ncuti Gatwa is charming, energetic and difficult not to like. The writing, however, veers between after-school special, Twitter thread and panto. Episodes end and I don’t feel the usual itch to adapt them; I feel as if I’ve scrolled past a very loud advert. When the programme you’re tying into no longer excites you, a licensed RPG has to work very hard indeed to justify its existence.
Meanwhile, Vortex sits there being quietly appropriate. It says, “Here is a game about clever, compassionate weirdos solving problems in time and space, where violence is a symptom of failure, not the main attraction.” Doctors & Daleks says, “Here is Dungeons & Dragons with the names filed off, optimised as best we can for clever, compassionate weirdos.” One is built for the job. The other is an impressive conversion, but still a conversion.
So Doctors & Daleks ended up on the “someone else will love this more” pile. Not because it’s shoddy (it isn’t) but because every time I imagined actually running it, I could see a cleaner alternative. If I want pure Doctor Who, the Vortex game is sitting there, rules tuned to exactly the sort of drama I want, and without a single opportunity attack in sight. If I want time-travel horror or messy timeline games, I’d rather lash it onto Call of Cthulhu, Trail, or some other horror chassis and let the setting be the star. If I want pulpy sci-fi derring-do, there are numerous systems on my shelf that do that without bringing along the baggage of 5E’s action economy.
That doesn’t mean Doctors & Daleks is pointless. I can see its natural habitat: a group who adore modern Doctor Who, who genuinely enjoy 5E, and who would like to tilt their weekly campaign from dungeons to Daleks without anyone learning a new ruleset. For that table, it’s a thoughtful bridge. It gives them Plot Points instead of hit points, Quips instead of spell slots, and an excuse to shout “Exterminate!” at each other on a Thursday night. There is nothing wrong with that.
I am simply not that GM any more. My own tastes have migrated to weirder, sharper systems. My affection for the Whoniverse has been gently smothered under continuity “innovations” and loud discourse. In that light, a 5E Doctor Who game was never going to be more than a curiosity I admired from a distance.
So yes: the sonic is back on the shelf, the blue books have gone to a better home, and I will, for the foreseeable future, be having my time travel in smaller, stranger doses. If I ever do return to running in the Doctor’s universe, it will be with a slimmer rulebook and far fewer hit points.
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