 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
APPENDIX 1: CREATING COMPANIONS
The easiest role for anyone to play in any role-playing game is himself, and with a little help from you, the referee, it is possible to do so in TIME LORD. First, the player should write a one-hundred word to two-hundred word resume of his background, detailing education and possible special abilities arising from sports and pastimes. This background will help you decide the appropriate level of his abilities in terms of the TIME LORD game. It might explain how the character comes to find himself in the TARDIS.
Creating a character is an open-ended procedure that requires the co-operation of the referee and the player concerned. It should not break out into a war of words about a character's abilities. You, the referee, have the last word in any dispute because you need to balance player characters' abilities with those of referee characters. One point extra in an ability represents a considerable increase in skill and may unreasonably raise a character's abilities above those of other, technically more competent people in the game world.
Having someone playing himself as a character, however, can be unsettling both for the player and his friends, who may suddenly learn more about that person than he might ordinarily reveal. In a way it is more challenging and interesting to get players to generate themselves as characters and have each of them play someone else.
Use the difficulty tables in Part Five along with the following guidelines to determine the common abilities of a player as a character. You, the referee, decide the actual values, applying any tests that are appropriate to determine the character's abilities.
There is an advanced character creation stem in Appendix 4 (page 159).
Strength
Give the player an arm-wrestling match after first rating your Strength (2 for puny, 3 for average, 4 for muscular and 5 for body-builder). If he easily beats you, his Strength is 2 higher; if he beats you after a struggle, his Strength is 1 higher than yours. An evenly matched referee and player have the same Strength. If the referee beats the player after a struggle, the player's character has a Strength of 1 less than the referee's; a player who is easily beaten has a Strength of 2 less than the referee's.
Control
Most players will have Control 3. Give any player who regular exercises or plays sports, say three times a week, Control 4. Track and field athletes should be given Control 5.
Size
Male characters will usually be Size 3; female characters will usually be Size 4. Size reflects both bulk and height, and should be modified according to a player's extremes.
Weight
Lightly built men, women or youths should have Weight 3; an averagely built person should have Weight 4; a thickset build coupled with great height deserves Weight 5.
Move
All human characters have Move 3 and the special ability of Running 1.
Knowledge
Knowledge can be gauged by the education a player has received. Education to primary school level counts as Knowledge 2; education to age 16 counts as Knowledge 3; sixth form counts as Knowledge 4; a university background counts as Knowledge 5. Well-travelled, worldwise players without formal education should have Knowledge that reflects their experience.
Determination
Most players will have Determination 3, but notable cowards, particularly nervous people or anyone who cannot kick an addictive habit such as smoking for more than a day should be given Determination 2. Anyone with a job that requires conspicuous bravery, such as a fireman or a soldier in a bomb disposal squad, should get Determination 4. To get Determination 5, the player needs to be more stubborn than the average mule.
Awareness
Anyone with a sight, smell or hearing impairment or who communicates awkwardly should be given Awareness 2. An average person has Awareness 3. Exceptionally observant players, or players with strong oratory abilities should be given Awareness 4.
Special abilities
A character is made unique by his special abilities, skills appropriate to his background and training. Go through the list of abilities provided in Part 3 and decide whether any are appropriate to the player's written background. Ignore any ability for which the player has received less than a month's full training or for which he has less than three years' on-the-job experience. Any special ability which meets these minimum requirements can be assigned a value of 1. If the player has five times this amount of training or experience, assign the special ability a value of 2.
Ordinary people are unlikely to have many of the quirky abilities such as Cheat Death, Iron Constitution, Keen Sight and Bench-thumping. A character, however, should be given Cheat Death if his Strength is less than 5: a Strength 4 character should have Cheat Death 1; a Strength 3 or Strength 2 character should have Cheat Death 2. The referee may give each character up to two points to be assigned to unique special abilities: a player might choose to assign the points to one or two special abilities, picking Sense of Balance 2, for example, or Iron Constitution 1 with Con 1. Only characters with very few special abilities should be given 2 points; most people will need only 1 point. A player should justify any particularly odd special ability that he wants.
Remember that player characters are ordinary people: they are not superhuman. Tone down values that seem excessive, but give each character some speciality that will prove useful on his travels with the Doctor. The equipment they have will be whatever they are carrying in their pockets when the character is generated.
Alison -- A Sample Character
Alison is a 20-year-old singer and dancer from 1991 London who is on the verge of breaking into the music industry with a unique blend of rap and bubblegum pop. Wearing purple and silver futuristic stage clothes, she stumbled into the TARDIS while mistaking it for a part of the set for a promotional video.
She is determined to control her own music and image and has learned how to use complicated electronic recording and mixing equipment; much of her work is composed at home using a keyboard, sampler and computer. Her own ideas of alien lifeforms are probably weirder than the real creatures and the universe holds few terrors for her; to her, adventuring in the TARDIS is fun. She has an attractive, round face, dark brown eyes and straight, shoulder-length black hair.
The referee gives her the following common abilities: Strength 3, Control 4, Size 4, Weight 3, Move 3, Knowledge 3, Determination 4, Awareness 3. She also gains the Strength-related ability of Cheat Death 2 and the Move-related ability of Running 1.
Her career, based on three years' composing and singing, gives her the Control-related ability of Dancing 1, the Knowledge-related abilities of Computing 1 and Electronics 1 and the Awareness-related abilities of Musicianship (keyboards) 1 and Singing 1. The referee, however, decides the quality of her voice is such that she deserves Singing 2. Her hordes of admirers warrant the ability of Striking Appearance 2.
Alison's player decides she wishes to enhance her strong will with the one point the referee allots her, picking the special ability of Independent Spirit 1. She has no equipment -- her stage costume was not designed to be practical!
Author's note for the curious
When Time Lord was originally written, rapstrix Betty Boo had a quirky video to her song Where Are You Baby? from which all the notes concerning Alison gain their inspiration. Where is that baby now?
APPENDIX 2: SAFE COMBAT
Basic combat in TIME LORD makes no distinction between lethal blows and non-lethal blows. Referees who wish to use a combat system that allows characters to be knocked out but not wounded by blows from fists and blunt weapons should use the rules for safe combat. It is highly recommended that these rules be used because they reduce the severity of Wounds inflicted on characters and so prolong characters' lives.
Safe combat creates a feeling of uncertainty, because players will not know whether an attack against them is going to be lethal or just knock them out. Referees should use safe combat to enhance the dramatic tension of an adventure. No one will know, for example, whether that blaster aimed at the Doctor is set to stun or set to kill: characters need the Doctor alive if they are to escape in the TARDIS, so they should be genuinely concerned if he is gunned down.
Any blunt weapon, natural weapon or blaster can be used to make knockout attacks. Instead of inflicting Wounds, such attacks inflict Shock equal to the number of Wounds the weapon would ordinarily make. A fist attack that inflicts 2 Wounds, for example, could be used to make a knockout attack that inflicts 2 Shock; an attack with a blunt weapon, usually inflicting 3 Wounds, could instead inflict 3 Shock.
Any player who wants to make a knockout attack must tell the referee before resolving the attack (the referee does not have to tell the players whether attacks from referee characters are lethal or knockout!). His character is assumed to be pulling his blows to avoid permanently harming his opponent.
Effect of Shock
Shock acts as Wounds for the purposes of getting through armour, overcoming Strength and recovery. Shock injuries make it difficult for a character to regain consciousness, but heal faster than Wounds. A character who has taken 3 Shock in effect has taken 3 short-term Wounds as far as recovery goes. Shock, however, does not count towards death and no character can be killed by Shock damage: whether a character is considered lightly wounded, seriously wounded or dead depends only on the number of Wounds he has taken.
In the Wounds boxes on the character sheet, mark genuine Wounds with a W and knockouts with KO to differentiate between the type of injury.
Healing
Shock damage heals far faster than Wounds. A character heals Shock at a rate equal to his Strength for every research turn of rest or inactivity. A Strength 3 character who had taken 4 Shock would have only 1 Shock after one research turn of rest.
First Aid or Medicine can be used to heal Shock damage in the same way as such abilities are used to heal Wounds. The character who applies his healing skills must decide whether his treatment will heal Shock or Wounds; any excess cannot be used to treat the other type of injury. First Aid, however, may be applied once to Shock and once to Wounds.
Blasters and Shock
Blasters become far more flexible and potent weapons with Shock damage. Instead of inflicting different amounts of Wounds when set to stun or kill, a blaster inflicts its maximum Wounds when set to kill and the same amount in Shock when set to stun.
A Dalek gun usually inflicts 8 Wounds when set to kill and 4 Wounds when set to stun. In safe combat, it inflicts 8 Wounds when set to kill and 8 Shock when set to stun.
Options
The following options for safe combat are recommended to referees who wish to broaden the scope of blasters as weapons. All are in keeping with technology in the DOCTOR WHO universe. The referee should decide before the game starts whether these rules will be applied.
Variable power blasters
The flexibility of blasters as weapons can be increased by allowing them to inflict any amount of damage from 1 to their maximum, either as Wounds or Shock. Before firing, a player should state at which level the blaster is set and whether it is set to kill or stun. In this way it is possible for a Dalek gun to deliver 1 to 8 Wounds or 1 to 8 Shock.
Blasters that are found by player characters must first be understood to change the settings, otherwise such weapons by default are set to maximum Wounds. The difficulty of understanding how to use a blaster is the Knowledge required to build such a device, typically 6 to understand an Earth-built blaster or 8 to understand an alien one.
Broad beam stun
Setting a blaster to stun diffuses the energy it emits, broadening the beam of energy emitted by the weapon. Any blaster set to stun reduces the difficulty of hitting a target by 1 owing to the indiscriminate nature of the energy beam.
Broad beam stun is particularly useful to enemies of the Doctor because it gives them a better chance of hitting him, especially when combined with group fire.
Power
The power of energy weapons is finite and it is possible that they will run out through continued use. To add to the uncertainty of using blasters, each one should be assigned a charge rating: this is the difficulty of it running out of energy and can be any figure from 1 to 20. Each time the blaster is fired counts as a cumulative ability of 1 which is used to test whether the blaster runs out. The blaster runs out if the referee beats the difference between the number of turns the gun has been fired and the charge rating.
Jamie picks up a blaster from a fallen space marine and fires at his pursuers, forcing them to take cover. The referee decides the gun is half charged and gives it a charge rating of 10. For the first five action turns, Jamie can fire without fear of the gun running out. On the sixth turn of firing, the cumulative power ability reaches six; the referee rolls the dice to try to beat a difference of 4. If he succeeds, the blaster runs out and Jamie must look for another weapon.
APPENDIX 3: DESIGNER'S NOTES
For Role-players
Experienced role-players have probably noticed that TIME LORD omits certain elements that are common to other role-playing games. Such omissions are quite deliberate! TIME LORD is intended to be easy to learn and easy to use, yet still be able to cope with the complex situations that role-players will inevitably hurl at the system. It is primarily intended for fans of the DOCTOR WHO television series, not all of whom will be familiar with the way a role-playing game runs or works, so some compromises have had to be made. But beneath the simplicity is some cunning mathematics behind the odds of success.
Gail Baker first provided the idea of levels of competence as a general game mechanic, but at the time I had no more idea of how to put them into effect than she did. Yet the idea of characters automatically being able to succeed at tasks they were competent to do appealed and was carefully placed in my mental filing cabinet. Inspiration strikes writers and designers in the weirdest places, and the notion of the subtractive six-sided dice system that TIME LORD has put into practice was no exception: the place and time in question was leaving the steamy confines of a bathroom in mid-winter. Now, some three years later, TIME LORD is reality.
Peter, TIME LORD's co-designer and an old friend and colleague, quickly became involved in the project. At the time, DOCTOR WHO hadn't been grafted onto the rules, and the game was in danger of remaining a private system played by only one group of people. But with US company FASA's licence for a DOCTOR WHO role-playing game set to expire, we saw an opportunity.
It is Peter who ensured TIME LORD continued to head in the direction in which it was intended to go, and who has curbed my wilder excesses -- excesses that might have seen the porcelain vase of flowers among the deadliest hand to hand combat weapons in the universe!
Both of us knew that if TIME LORD were to appeal to most DOCTOR WHO fans, the rules had to be easy to understand. We also wanted to encourage role-playing rather than rule-playing -- the optimized rule-bending that sadly afflicts many role-playing games. Out went character progression systems and character generation systems, because we believe the enjoyment of role-playing comes through doing, not the accumulation of abstract numbers of points. We hope to have erred on the side of description of characters and aliens rather than numbers. Such details are for those people who master TIME LORD as it stands, and perhaps one day may materialize in a volume called TIME LORD COMPANION.
Ideally, rules should be transparent to the players of a role-playing game. Mechanics that intrude on play are largely unwelcome except where rolling the dice creates dramatic tension -- the points in an adventure where the players believe their plan depends on the success or failure of one person or gadget. Some people, of course, like rolling dice and it is quite possible to play TIME LORD this way by always giving characters difficulties to beat that are greater than their abilities. Conversely, by setting difficulties at levels below most of the characters' abilities it is possible to play a game of TIME LORD without anyone but the referee rolling the dice -- as near to a diceless role-playing system as I believe it is possible to get yet still presenting a viable rules structure that will settle arguments. Such a mechanic assumes that the players will choose the best character for the job -- if they do so, rather than letting even the most cack-handed character have a go, success will usually follow. The more I playtest the system, the happier I become with assumed levels of competence as a game mechanic: the story, generated by the referee as well as the players, becomes the driving force of the game.
Gone, too, are details of specific weapons, which I chose to treat generically. On a scale of one to ten that embraces the minimum and maximum values in the universe, one gun is very much like another, and a sword becomes simply a sword, whether it is a sabre wielded by a British light dragoon of the Napoleonic Wars or the two-handed broadsword of a medieval knight. Weapons, therefore, are described by type with limitations on their use. In the context of the DOCTOR WHO series, it is also important that few if any Earth weapons should remotely endanger Daleks, Cybermen, or any other warlike alien species. Besides, I wanted to de-emphasize the role of combat in the game.
There is also a noticeable famine of tables. I have concentrated on providing only those tables that are essential to the running of the game, and those that exist are largely for the benefit of the referee. Too many tables can be as much a disservice as too few, because a proliferation of tabular information cannot easily be absorbed. But because TIME LORD uses one simple mechanic -- beat the difference -- consistently throughout the game, many tables become redundant. Ultimately, only the difficulties tables are needed to drive the system.
For the sake of stats fans, however, and to prevent a mad rush for calculators, the odds of beating differences of 0, 1, 2, 3 and 4 are respectively 83%, 55%, 33%, 16% and 5%. Increasing a difficulty by one therefore has a marked effect on the odds of success. In practice it means characters will comfortably be able to do something at the limits of their abilities (a difficulty equal to the ability) and have an evens chance of succeeding at something one higher than their abilities. No one has a chance of success if the difficulty is five or more higher than his appropriate ability. This decision is quite deliberate: anyone who is attempting a task whose difficulty is four higher than his ability is attempting virtually the impossible as it is given that the game assumes complete competence at difficulties less than his ability. Should the characters confront the impossible, they need to find either a way round the obstruction or someone to whom it is not impossible.
Those role-players who believe characters should always have a chance of success should remember that most companions in TIME LORD are no more than ordinary people, not heroes, and that ordinary people often have no chance of success. Life, the universe, and the DOCTOR WHO television series frequently demonstrate this fact.
TIME LORD is primarily designed as an effect game: its intention is to recreate the effects of the DOCTOR WHO universe, not real life. Although I have said combat is not the main purpose of the game, nowhere does this effect show more than in TIME LORD's rules for combat.
It is perfectly possible in TIME LORD for two opponents to knock each other out at the same time in hand to hand combat. Ludicrous as it sounds, it reflects what happens in the television series. What matters is the speed at which unconscious characters recover. It is partly the reason why I opted for simultaneous combat rather than an initiative based system. Simultaneous combat means the players must trust the referee not to take advantage of their situation -- and a reasonably competent referee doesn't need to -- but it also cuts down on bookkeeping.
It is also perfectly possible for two lines of enemy soldiers to fire at each other at only short range and miss. Again it sounds ludicrous, but it happens in the series. The referee has a most useful tool here: the group fire rule. If he chooses to keep the Daleks, say, in clusters of five and use the group fire rule, these creatures become the deadly aliens they occasionally appear to be. By choosing to shoot individually at a separate target, or by forgoing group fire, the average Dalek hasn't a hope of hitting the Doctor or his companions provided that the characters dodge. And here the referee can assure the speedy dispatch of unimportant referee characters simply by assuming they do not dodge. Look at the series and see how it works.
To my mind the game works best when the safe combat rules in Appendix Two are added. In combination with the referee's tools of decision and difficulties, being able to put down an opponent and yet not reveal whether a blaster was set to kill or stun serves to increase the tension in the game. It also conveys the spirit of script immunity that so many of the Doctor's companions desperately need.
Theory is all very well, but it takes playtesting to check whether the rules work in practice. My playtesters (and the characters they played) were Patrick Brady (himself), Paul Mason (Steven Taylor), Dave Morris (the first Doctor), Mark Pawelek (James Wallis), Jamie Thomson (the spider-infested Captain Jameson) and James Wallis (Vicki). Patrick deserves special mention for reading and criticizing an early draft of the rules, as well as testing them almost to destruction. And far, far earlier in time Mike Cule (as the third Doctor), Paul Mason (as Sergeant Benton) and Rachel Hopkins (as Liz) tested a very different system, none of which I'm glad to say has made it into TIME LORD.
Thanks too must go to Pete Tamlyn, Marc Gascoigne, Dave Morris, Paul Mason (yet again!), Murray Writtle and Emma Sansone whose own rule systems have given me much to think about and digest before I dared write my own.
For DOCTOR WHO fans
Many fans will probably be wondering how accurate is TIME LORD. The answer is, quite simply, as accurate as the television series itself. All the information about the Doctors, companions, aliens and enemies is taken from the series, which I regard as the only accurate source of official information. Only by accident has anything crept in from the novelizations or Jean-Marc Lofficier's virtually indispensable reference works. Together, Peter and I have watched almost every surviving episode of the programme -- our notes alone are equivalent to another volume the size of TIME LORD! Even precious, previously lost stories such as The Ice Warriors have somehow come our way.
Some information, therefore, may be contrary to popular belief or modern usage. TARDIS is clearly defined as Time And Relative Dimension In Space in An Unearthly Child and we have kept to this definition despite its frequent corruption to 'Dimensions'. The spellings of names have been taken from the programme credits on screen, and so you will find Brigadier Lethbridge Stewart instead of his hyphenated modern-day equivalent.
TIME LORD, however, is a rule book and must impose some sense of authority. If there has been more than one version of something in the series, Peter and I have chosen whatever is best for game play. In some cases, too, for the sake of providing information that players will surely ask, we have invented tiny pieces of history: true aficionados will doubtless have fun wheedling them out. Our own bias will surely show as well: the Doctors of our childhood were played by William Hartnell, Patrick Troughton and Jon Pertwee and it is perhaps inevitable that our strongest impressions come from these eras. Thus it is that we chose to detail the Cybermen that confronted the second Doctor -- the time we believe they were at their scariest.
Sharp-eyed fans will have noticed the absence of three characters sometimes considered companions of the Doctor and whom we regard as only supporting characters: Katarina, the Trojan slave girl, security agent Sara Kingdom and the shapechanging robot Kamelion. We apologize to fans for these characters' absence, but the short lives of Katarina and Sara as well as the impressionable nature of Kamelion make them unsuitable as player characters; even as a referee character, Kamelion -- who is no more than a cipher -- is limited in his potential.
Similarly, the number of aliens and villains has been limited by the space available: alone they are worthy of a separate book. But we have heeded the polls and included most of the popular monsters, besides indulging ourselves.
Researching the programme has shown the strengths and weaknesses of all the Doctors and his companions. It has also created a strong attachment to all of them. But most of all it has shown us what a strong team the first Doctor has when the programme first started, and what a fine mix of drama, comedy, horror and science fiction the series has encompassed over the years. Perhaps this accounts for DOCTOR WHO's longevity.
My undying thanks go to Richard Devlin and the network of fans who have kept available one of the finest science fiction series to appear on television. Without you, the accuracy of this book would have been in doubt.
Spread the word.
Ian Marsh
Putney, June 1991
APPENDIX 4: ADVANCED CHARACTER CREATION (click here to view Table 13)
TIME LORD originally presented only scanty guidelines on creating companions to adventure with the Doctor, for two good reasons. First, for a beginner's role-playing game it seemed advisable to present characters that could be quickly given out ready for play; character creation can rather get in the way of welcoming newcomers to what is a rather unusual pastime.
Second, the whole prospect of designing a comprehensive character generation system for Time Lords as a race, human companions and sundry aliens and robots was rather daunting and threatened to consume too much space in the book. Such a system might also be rather complicated for a newcomer to role-playing to understand.
A third, and not so good reason, was that as the author of the rules system, I hadn't much idea how to go about it!
I believe I have already said that inspiration strikes in the strangest places. Well, it has happened again, and now you will all know what thoughts disturb the mind of one commuter as he contemplates wind-swept Earlsfield station in the early morning.
One obstacle to the character creation system is that I wanted to use the consistent dice-rolling mechanism of the whole game in some way. Uniform systems are all very well, but they can also be a pain in the game designer's neck! None the less, the dice are used to provide a variable element for each character.
The final note I have to say about character creation is that companions are not superheroes. Although some of them may be quite competent in certain areas, in general a companion is just an ordinary person who has found himself or herself caught up in the Doctor's adventures. This character creation system is intended to create such ordinary, human companions to accompany one of the existing Doctors; it has no ambition to be anything else.
Concept
There are two ways of shaping a character. First, you can imagine a person, his background, how he will react to certain circumstances, and his likes and loathings and then tailor the numbers to fit this concept. Second, you can work out all the numerical information, assign common abilities and pick special abilities, using such game-related material to help envisage the character as a person. Either way is satisfactory. If you are stuck for ideas, try modelling a companion on one of your friends or a well-known actor. As a player you have a free choice whether your companion is young or old, male or female, and which time period the character belongs to -- there are no rules here to help you decide these factors! The only limit is that the character must be human and of Earth origin (descendants of space colonies are all right, too).
Mechanics
Each player starts with a number of points with which, in effect, he buys the character's skills. As the procedure involves juggling numbers, a pencil and paper will prove handy to make notes before filling in a proper character sheet. A pack of cards may prove useful, as will be explained later.
Creating a character
Each character starts with eight abilities at 3, four abilities at 2 and eight abilities at 1. In addition, the character gains anything from zero to twenty 1-point abilities decided by the roll of the dice. These additional abilities are calculated by rolling a pair of six-sided dice four times and summing the differences of each roll -- for each roll of the dice, therefore, the character gains from zero to five 1-point abilities. The result on the dice is read the same way as in the TIME LORD rules -- and similarly, rolling a big difference each time is best.
The best possible combination, therefore, after the dice have been rolled is a character with eight 3-point abilities, four 2-point abilities and twenty-eight 1-point abilities (the worst leaves him with only the basic eight 1-point abilities).
These values are then assigned to the character subject to the rules regarding combination and limitations. The player must assign values to each of the eight main abilities, and can spend the rest as he likes on the special abilities listed in the rule book.
It is highly recommended that characters who opt for low Strength acquire the Cheat Death ability at 2 points if they have Strength 3 and at 1 point if they have Strength 4.
Combining abilities
Any ability can be combined with another ability of the same value to obtain a single ability that is one higher in value. But a high value ability can never be broken down into a lower value ability. Thus, two 2-point abilities can be combined to yield one 3-point ability, but a 3-point ability cannot be broken down into two 2-point abilities.
In effect it costs thirty-two 1-point abilities to gain one 6-point ability, sixteen 1-point abilities to gain one 5-point ability, eight 1-point abilities to gain one 4-point ability, four 1-point abilities to gain a 3-point ability and two 1-point abilities to gain a 2-point ability (most cost-effective!). Thus a 3-point ability is affordable and within the reach of most characters, but to gain several 4-pointers requires careful budgeting.
The best approach is to ensure the eight common abilities have values of 3 or 4, perhaps with one 5, and to enhance these with well-chosen special abilities. This way a character can get a total ability of 6 cheaply through using two 3-point abilities (a cost of eight 1-point abilities instead of thirty-two); the downside is a low general value in the appropriate common ability.
Limitations
A value must be assigned to each of the eight common abilities -- Strength, Control, Size, Weight, Move, Knowledge, Determination and Awareness -- subject to the minimum and maximum possible values for a human companion given in Table 13.
Certain values will very much shape the appearance and possible background of a character. A character with Size 5 is either a child, and must select his other background skills appropriately, or a dwarf; the character cannot be imagined as resembling an average adult human. Referees should look for such potential discrepancies in generated characters and advise the player accordingly.
In addition, special abilities may not be greater in value than the governing main ability: a character with a Control of 3 cannot have a Marksmanship of 4; the maximum ability he can have is Marksmanship 3. To obtain a total ability of 7 the character must have Control 4 and Marksmanship 3.
Bookkeeping suggestions
Players with access to a number of packs of playing cards can use them to keep track of their changes in ability -- about four packs will be necessary. Issue the player with cards whose numeric value is equal to the abilities of the character, using court cards as ones if there is a shortage of aces. Thus a basic character will get eight threes, four twos and eight aces. Each time the player wishes to combine two abilities, he hands the referee two equal cards and receives one higher value card in exchange: filling in the character sheet is then a simple matter of comparing remaining cards with spaces on the sheet. The referee is also completely in control of the bookkeeping, eliminating any 'creative accountancy' on the part of the player.
Starting equipment
Characters start with a set of clothing and nothing else. They may, however, trade in abilities to secure equipment. None is a particularly cost-effective purchase, but then money is of no real use to most of the companions and they will be hard-pressed to find shops on places such as Metebelis 3. Abilities can also be spent to buy status, such as rank within an organization like UNIT (organizations may also require purchasing of a pass, representing membership and security vetting).
1-point ability
This will secure a trivial item of no apparent worth, or a common, everyday item for the character's time period. Examples: a pocketful of loose change, a plain metal ring, golden star of mathematical excellence, walking stick or umbrella, a set of house keys, cricket ball, string, bag of jelly babies, pen knife.
2-point ability
This secures a useful item of some worth. Examples: skeleton keys, hunting knife, gold jewellery, binoculars, mobile telephone, transistor radio.
3-point ability
This secures an item of notable worth or a low position of authority. Examples: hand-to-hand weapons such as a sword or mace, primitive missile weapons such as a bow, unreliable firearms such as muzzle-loading pistols and muskets, partial armour or a shield, rank of sergeant.
4-point ability
This will secure a valuable item or a position of moderate responsibility. Examples: security pass for a secret service or UNIT, reliable guns, full armour, motorized transport, rank of captain.
5-point ability
This will secure an exceptionally valuable item or a position of power. Examples: technological device of equivalent ability to the sonic screwdriver, national head of UNIT, presidency, membership of the royal family.
Referees might also like to invent special devices that characters can own, for example:
Infallible firearm (5-point ability)
A revolver, automatic pistol or laser pistol that always begins any new adventure with a full magazine or charge. This makes the weapon far more attractive than the run-down or partly empty guns that characters may be forced to use in the course of an adventure.
Bullet-proof pocketwatch (4-point ability)
A one-use item that automatically stops the first bullet to strike the front of the character; the watch is destroyed in the process.
Unused abilities
A character need not be generated using all his abilities; some may be held unspent to gain an appropriate skill when the player needs. This helps reflect an inherent talent for a subject that the character has never tackled before.
Experience
TIME LORD characters should advance their skills only slowly as gaining even one point in an ability represents a great leap in skill. To this end, at the end of each adventure, a player may make one roll of the dice to increase one of his character's abilities by one point. If the player chooses not to roll the dice at the end of one adventure, it increases his chance of learning at the end of a subsequent adventure.
The basic object is to beat the difference between the number of adventures a character has gone without making an experience roll and the desired total ability.
Patrick has Knowledge 4 and wishes to learn Cybernetics 1 after a close call with the Cybermen and a number of robots in his first adventure. He must therefore beat a difference of 4 to learn the ability (desired total ability for Cybernetics equals 5). If he waited until the end of his second adventure, he would need to beat a difference of 3.
After a player makes an experience roll, regardless of whether it succeeds or fails, the number of adventures resets to zero. Each time a character successfully makes an experience roll, the difficulty to make the next roll increases by 1. This penalty is cumulative.
Assuming Patrick gained Cybernetics 1 after one adventure and then wished to gain Cybernetics 2 after a subsequent adventure, a penalty of 1 would be added to the total desired ability. The total desired ability would be 6, but the penalty raises it so the difficulty becomes 7. He would need to complete three more adventures to have a chance at gaining Cybernetics 2, at which point he would need to beat a difference of 4. If he succeeded at this and wished to progress to Cybernetics 3, he would incur a penalty of 2, making the base difficulty 9 and requiring the completion of five more adventures before a roll could be made.
At all times the referee decides when an adventure concludes and an experience roll can be made. A character may never improve more than one ability whenever he earns an increase. Also, the eight common abilities may never be increased; only special abilities may be gained or increased.
The experience roll assumes that a player is attempting to increase an ability which was appropriate to one of his adventures; if it is not appropriate, the referee should increase the difficulty of succeeding at the experience roll. The referee should keep a log of attempts made or failed, and the experience gained. The general intention of these rules is to allow characters to pick up one or two abilities that may be useful as they become more experienced with role-playing and TIME LORD in particular.
Sample character: Simone
Simone starts with eight 3-point abilities, four 2-point abilities and eight 1-point abilities. She rolls the dice, generating differences of 0, 1, 3 and 2, gaining her six extra 1-point abilities (giving a total of fourteen 1-point abilities).
To start, she assigns values of 3 to Control, Size, Weight and Determination, a value of 2 to Strength and a value of 1 to Awareness. The four remaining 3-point abilities, she combines twice to give a Knowledge of 5 (four 3-point abilities = two 4-point abilities = one 5-point ability. She must still assign a value to Move, so she combines two 1-point abilities to give a two-point ability, which in turn is combined with the remaining three 2-point abilities to give one 4-point ability.
Her abilities currently are as follows: Strength: 2, Control: 3, Size: 3, Weight: 3, Move: 4, Knowledge: 5, Determination: 3, Awareness: 1.
She is left with eleven 1-point abilities, and elects to take the special abilities of Cheat Death 2, Bench-thumping 2, Driving 2, Mechanics 1 and Engineering 1. On reflection, she believes her Awareness to be too low, and combines the remaining three 1-point abilities with it to give Awareness 3. Her final abilities are:
Strength: 2, Cheat Death 2
Control: 3, Bench-thumping 2
Size: 3
Weight: 3
Move: 4, Driving 2
Knowledge: 5, Mechanics 1, Engineering 1
Determination: 3
Awareness: 3
Simone starts only with the clothes she wears. She envisages her character as an enthusiastic car mechanic who loves tinkering. Heaven help the Doctor when she gets loose in the TARDIS!
