Category Archives: Structure

Jodie Whittaker as the Doctor reading information from off of her sonic screwdriver

Player Throws The Switch

I’m going to talk about It Takes You Away, so in principle, the article contains spoilers if, for some reason, you haven’t watched it yet.

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So, the Doctor, halfway through, goes into a detailed discussion about the Solitract. She explains that one of her seven grandmas used to tell her stories about it and expands on the genesis of the entity and the situation forced upon it.

As a plotline for a show, this might seems a little strange—it feels like the Doctor makes a bit of a leap in reaching the conclusion that the Solitract could be the source of this problem. However, there have been stranger leaps of faith before… (the combined belief of a planet reversing the aging process of a Timelord, anyone?)

What I found interesting, from the perspective of a Gamemaster, was that this recollection and exposition about the Solitract felt like a “Hang on, I have an idea!” Story Point expenditure in Doctor Who: Adventures in Time and Space. A big spend. It’s the sort of spend where you make a leap and maybe the player creates something that explains everything and turns the plotline on its head. It feels like maybe even the Gamemaster didn’t have an answer—or if they did, they weren’t committed to it so strongly that they’re unwilling to let the players change it.

On that level, it feels really organic and rather nice.

Cookie Dough

So, you have this mixture. Sweet and tasty, with a generous scattering of chocolate chips. You’re not committed to making small cookies, big cookies, or maybe something else—you just know you have something tasty. And then someone rolls up and suggests cookie dough ice cream or, heck, freeze the dough for another time because they’re got doughnuts fresh from the bakery.

That’s what this feels like… (sort of)

It’s the sort of game where the GM has the start and finish in mind, but hasn’t nailed everything down. A tasty dessert in mind—cookies; and everyone should come away happy.

The start is a spooky house in the woods with a girl inside scared of a monster and certain that it took her father away. The end is the girl and her father being reunited—nothing more than that; that’s the end game here, the reunion. The existence of a specific threat probably has crossed the GM’s mind, but not necessarily the specifics beyond a rough outline.

It could be cookies, but it doesn’t have to be… It could be a crafty alien merchant stealing people out of other dimensions to rob them and feed them to his local predator… Couldn’t it?

Indeed, Ribbon and the interstitial void with the moths feel like they could have been the answer for the disappearances, but later—once the player characters pass through the cave, find the other side and the Solitracts makes an appearance—the GM redefines the role of the void and Ribbon; it almost becomes an afterthought.

(It sort of feels that way in the show, like the writer needed something to sit between the two houses but wasn’t really solid on the idea of what and why.)

Hook. Close. Improvise the Rest.

Sort of. That’s a lot to ask.

Certainly, it works that way with convention games for me. I have a hook, a way to start the game; I also have some actors and a couple of encounters in mind. The rest… Well, we shall see what happens and figure it out on the fly.

It’s why I recommend reading, viewing and listening to more Who, because how the variables arrive and work within the confines of the story can be educational if you break it down.

You have to be comfortable with it—letting the players come up with something totally new and off the wall is a big ask—but, part of the deal should be that everyone contributes to the success of the story. Perhaps, next time, you will need to haggle or bargain the players down because you have an idea that’s really cool and you don’t want to lose it. That’s OK—it should be fun for you too, and that means some of the prep should find a conclusion.

But, if you keep the prep light and fluffy, willing to improvise, it won’t hurt so much when the players derail it all.

The Ghost Monument

The Ghost Monument had a lot to say about the way you play time-travelling adventures, about not setting barriers but, at the same time, creating alien environments from the familiar. It wasn’t necessarily subtle, but programmes like Star Trek and Doctor Who have been doing that since the 60s. When you play adventures in sci-fi, don’t make the challenge understanding the small stuff – make it grand and strange, weird and disconcerting.

We’re (Not) All Human

In truth, humanity costs less than alien. When you have an alien, you need effects – cosmetic or CGI. When you do human – perhaps with a little tweak to the nose or a daub of paint on the temples – you can still be alien bit without needing the audience – or the players – to make a leap in their understanding.

The Ghost Monument did that brilliantly here because Ryan, Yasmin and Graham desperately want to find an anchor, a solid foundation in the world of Desolation. If they can find something familiar they can work outward from their in quantifying the strange and the alien. Neither Epzo nor Angstrom offer that – they don’t know what Earth is or humans for that matter. The sense of connection that the companions seek refuses to manifest, like the Ghost Monument itself.

When you run a game of Renegade or Doctor Who  don’t attempt to create aliens that stretch the imagination or demand lengthy description. When you opt for human-like aliens, you can achieve the sense of the alien by robbing the player characters of any common ground. Even in an alternate history adventure, you can achieve the same result when no one recognises Kennedy or Shakespeare, despite every certainty they should be known to everyone.

Universal Translator

For a very long time the TARDIS has been the essential element that made the whole business of alien languages make sense. The telepathic link with the TARDIS meant that everything made sense – spoken or written. In The Ghost Monument, without a TARDIS to fall back on, we have medi-units that achieve the same result, injecting a sub-dermal universal translator chip on detecting the lack of one.

While it might be interesting to occasionally find the travellers unable to understand the world around them, it makes for a simpler game all together if you skip language and move on. In a game with many skills, even spending a few points on a language means not picking something cool. In Renegade, you only have a couple of Specials to start with, so why would you spend them on something like Linguistics or whatever.

The challenge of the adventures should be more than the simple barriers of language. If you want the incomprehensible, they consider a puzzle instead, a riddle or hidden cypher than can challenge the player to solve it. Language confounds the characters and makes the game harder to run, never mind play.

Oh… I Forgot I Put Stuff in these Pockets

“I never said it would be easy, I only said it would be worth it.” If you offer the player characters the basics, they can work out the rest and use their ingenuity and background to fill in the gaps. A spark of imagination and a half-abandoned warehouse full of tools sounds like an A-Team montage scene to me – and the same should apply when the player characters need to create a missing sonic multi-tool or cobble together a means to temporarily immobilise an enemy.

Give them string, sunglasses, a cricket ball, a transistor radio and a packet of jelly babies – because with that lot they have a world of potential. The path ahead shouldn’t be plain sailing, by any means, but dumping the characters in an alien jail every time they get captured with nothing to work with will just get tiresome. Make that jail a tool shed. Make that cell someone’s stationery cabinet. Or at least give the characters a tool they can chisel a message into a stone pillar with and discover it by chance three adventures earlier so they can organise an escape.

Don’t You See… I Got It Mostly Right

Human but alien. Comprehensible but puzzling. Most of the answers but without all the facts about the problem or the tools to get it resolved. Playing a game of Renegade or Doctor Who should be challenging for all the right reasons – filled with people, clues, puzzles, mystery, abandoned ruins, odd remnants and more than a scattering of ghosts and memories. In the midst of all that lies fun without frustration – and the promise of adventures yet to come.