The Doctors & Daleks Announcement

The thread

Emmet Byrne, Cubicle 7's creative director, has posted a thread on Twitter about the backlash that Cubicle 7 have had for announcing that they're producing a version of their Doctor Who RPG called Doctors and Daleks which will be compatible with Dungeons and Dragons Fifth Edition. If you're going to read this, then I encourage you to read the thread before you go on.

I guess the backlash is to be expected, as there were grumblings amongst the Twitteratti when Cubicle 7 produced the Adventures in Middle Earth line, which sensitively ported The One Ring to a Fifth Edition chassis, but was very much its own thing. Although I'm a massive TOR fan (I have both the lines from Cubicle 7 and Fria Ligan) I have copies of the AiME books and they're very well done. I wouldn't use them for Middle Earth as a go too, but they'd work well. Definitely better than MERP did. 

It's worth observing that I am running an extended campaign using the Fifth Edition rules. If you read this blog regularly, you'll have seen the Curse of Strahd posts. It's was the first D&D that I've run properly since 2nd Edition AD&D at school. I'd dabbled with some Black Hack related games, but I never expected to be running a campaign that had reached its thirty five session using D&D.

It's also worth noting that I have pretty much the entire Doctor Who RPG line, because the series was part of my youth. I managed to put a tooth through my lip when I tripped running from the theme music as a kid, heading to get behind the sofa. It's a game that I want to get to the table at some point because I think that it will be really fun. 

The truth is that Cubicle 7's Doctor Who line has pretty much reached a mature state. There's not a huge amount more that they can publish unless they release an adventure or campaign book, the new Doctor book when Jodie Whitaker moves on or reissue older material against the revised rules they've recently published. There's not a lot of momentum there. From a business perspective, it makes a lot of sense to release a Fifth edition port. There's a licence fee to be paid to the BBC and sales from the new game will probably have a halo effect for the sourcebooks for the original line. Adventures in Middle Earth showed that there's a huge part of the RPG market that is just D&D. Data from the Virtual Tabletops backs this up. You have D&D, and you have the rest of the market.

A rules port could be done really sympathetically to the property. The initiative system could be lifted (it favours the players by action type with Talkers going first, followed by Movers, Doers and finally Fighters), and at its heart D&D 5e has a consistent rules engine (roll high D20 with advantage/disadvantage) which would work fine. They can easily drop most of the combat crunch out and just run with the core game. I've faith that this is what will happen.

The anger about this announcement is pretty much misplaced. I'd be willing to bet that many who have joined in don't own the Doctor Who RPG, and are just dogpiling on Cubicle 7 because they've announced a product for Fifth Edition. They don't like the reality that D&D dominates the tabletop gaming space. There's no need for the anger.

Personally, I'm not going to be buying the product because I don't see any need for it for me. I have the current game; my main decision is whether I buy the second edition core book for the revised rules. But there are a lot of people out there who will find this an attractive proposition and are heavily invested in the Fifth Edition engine.

I think it's nice to see some love from Cubicle 7 for their other properties; recently, they've seemed more like 'the Warhammer RPG' company, which is a whole other discussion.

20th February 2022