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This isn't a nice review to have to write, because I've been a fan of the Doctor Who RPG since it first came out. I've been GMing it for about 10 years now, and have bought each and every new edition and expansion that Cubicle 7 has published. They've had a remarkable good run and I don't think they've ever put a foot wrong, until now.
The most prominent change you'll notice moving from First Edition to Second Edition is the removal of Traits. Traits were the little interesting quirks you attached to your character during character creation to make them unique. You'd have simple little ones like "Brave" or "Cowardly", and big, more complex ones like "Telekinetic" or "Immortal", each with their own little rules for how to play them. It was a really nice, flexible system. Sure, some of the minor traits probably didn't need to be spelled out so formally (giving charm bonuses for a character being Attractive probably doesn't need a paragraph in the rule book), but in general they provided clear, balanced rules for playing pretty much any character you could think of. Possibly even more importantly, it was the fun part of character creation; the part where you take your generic Ood or Sontaran or whatever and ask yourself "Do they have a recurring nemesis? An unreliable heart? Do they have any cyborg body parts?" Everybody loved picking Traits!
Except, apparently they didn't. Because Traits are gone now and replaced with Focuses and Distinctions, and the book tries its hardest to gaslight you into thinking that Traits were some sort of awful mathematical burden that you're better off without. Focuses and Distinctions try to fill in what Traits used to do, but are blander, more hand-wavey, and less well defined. The book tells you that they allow you to "add character to your character without worrying about points and values" but, to be honest, that comes across as the sales pitch of somebody who's just replaced the wheels of your car with digestive biscuits and is trying to tell you that it's an improvement because now they taste delicious.
I'll start with Focuses. Every character has a Focus, which is defined in the book as "What makes them tick?". Essentially it's your character's driving force defined in one-or-two words, and it functions a little bit like the Traits of old. When your character does something that could be helped by their focus (for example, a person with a Romance Focus flirting), they get some extra dice on their roll. When your character uses their focus as justification not to do something (for example, somebody with a law focus refusing to commit a crime), they get rewarded with story points. The trouble is though, hammering a character down into a focus-shaped box leaves you with flat, one-dimensional characters. Yes, you've saved on book-keeping by not having to write down as many Traits, but you've essentially given your character "their thing", and that's what that character is going to be about.
I can understand where the Focus concept came from. Just before he regenerated, the Twelfth Doctor told his next incarnation to "Be Kind", and sure enough, the Thirteenth Doctor's thing has been kindness. And yes, "Kindness" is her focus on the pregen character sheet. The trouble is that this one-note approach would generally be seen as more of a weakness than a strength of the current era of Doctor Who, and it also doesn't really apply to any character other than the Thirteenth Doctor. What made the Tenth Doctor tick? Loads of things: compassion, justice, loneliness, grief over the Time-Lords, his love for Rose, his own vanity and self-importance. If you were to try and force all of that down into one Focus you'd either have to pick one random thing from the list, disregarding every other aspect of his character, or pick something so vague that it could literally apply to any character ever. Cubicle 7 has done both of these with their pregens: Yaz's focus is "The Law" and Ryan's is "Hope". If the creators of the game can't even make the Focus system interesting, then what hope do the players have?
Then we have the Distinctions, which are sort of replacements for the bigger Traits only not nearly as well defined. Let's look at a Time-Lord character for example. In the First Edition, a Time-Lord would have a particular set of Traits: Time-Lord, Code of Conduct, Feel the Turn of the Universe, and Vortex. Time-Lord gives an Ingenuity bonus and lets them regenerate (as defined in the regeneration rules), Code of Conduct binds them to a code of behaviour, Feel the Turn of the Universe gives an innate ability to tell if time has been tampered with, and Vortex lets them fly a time machine. Sure, some of these things should probably go without saying, and a lot of them could be merged together, but each one of them is specific, and has its own defined rules which the players of GM can check at any time.
Compare that to the Time-Lord Distinction given as an example in the Second Edition. Directly from the book, a Time-Lord's abilities are: "able to generate, telepathic, lonely". How does regeneration work? Don't know! It's not defined in the book. How does telepathy work? Also, not in the book! The First Edition has specific rules for telepathic powers, differentiating Clairvoyance, Telepathy, Hypnosis, and Telekinesis, and setting rolls and limits on each of them. In this case it seems the whole concept has just been left up to whatever whim the GM takes. As I've said, I've been running the game for 10 years now, and in that time I've GM'ed several telepathic characters. You know what's really handy to have when they want to try some crazy mind-power hijnks? A table of rules so they can know exactly what their limits are!
Cubicle 7 would probably defend this as reducing the amount of maths in the game, and generally getting people away from having to look things up in the book. But it's so inconsistent! The rules governing telepathic powers are gone, yet there's still a table on page 102 defining how much damage a character will take over a number of days in 30 degree temperatures, and how this differs from 45 degree temperatures. There's been plenty of episodes of Doctor Who with various forms of psychic powers involved, but I don't think there's ever been one about The Doctor getting sunburned after spending a week walking around in the summer. It's like they honestly made an effort to cut out all of the most useful, fun rules and only leave in the really mundane ones that nobody ever read.
Focuses and Distinctions aside, there's also been some changes to how dice-rolls work. In First Edition your level of success or failure at a task depended on how high or low you rolled under the target. This has been changes to a D&D-like system of critical successes and failures. You roll one 1, something bad happens, two 1s and it's a critical failure, and the same in reverse with 6s. It's an interesting idea, and it does make it a lot quicker to calculate how well a roll has gone. A weird side-effect though, is that if a caveman and Bill Gates both roll to hack a computer system, they are both just as likely to get a critical success. This seems like a pretty unbalancing flaw, but critical successes are so rare that I'm not sure how much impact it would have on most campaigns, and it does make things a bit more efficient. I'd have to play more to make up my mind.
Story Points have been nerfed, allowing the player to effectively reroll their lowest dice for a higher number rather than adding addititional dice to their roll. On the one hand, this prevents a player with a low skill succeeding at something very unlikely by throwing a bunch of Story Points at it. On the other hand, people with low skill succeeding at something very unlikely is pretty much the character development arc of most Doctor Who companions. The jury is out on this one too.
There's also been a slightly questionable change to the Skills system. Fighting and Marksman are gone and have been merged into the singular "Combat" skill. This is to make room for a new skill called "Intuition". Personally I don't think it makes much sense that a boxer and archer would both be using the same skill for their professions, and I think it's questionable if Intuition actually is a skill (when have you ever heard of anyone training get better at hunches?), but this is fairly minor.
To bring some positivity though, there is one aspect of the Second Edition that really shines, and that's the Experiences system. Character growth in the First Edition was very ill-defined, and advice to the GM was pretty much "let people have an extra skill point now and then, if you feel like it." Well, that is now gone, and the new rules are fantastic! Basically, now, at the end of each game, everyone sits down and reminisces about the cool things that they've just done. Then each of them chooses one particularly cool experience that each character had, and that gets written on the character's sheet. Now, every time that character experiences a similar situation they can recall that Experience to get an extra dice added onto their roll. Even better, each time an Experience is recalled, it increases in value, and can eventually be traded in for a permanent boost to a skill or attribute. This is an excellent incentive to keep players invested in the campaign, and is a really clever way of keeping the memory of previous sessions fresh. Gamifying the process of reminiscing about a session is genuinely an ingenious idea!
Overall though, Experience system aside, I can't really recommend this edition of the game when the First Edition exists and does almost everything either just as well or better. It's very frustrating because I feel this could have been an opportunity to do some really great things with the Doctor Who brand. Simplyifying some of the Traits and streamlining some of the more cumbersome systems is a great idea, but its been done with such overzealousness that it's stripped out all of the fun. As it stands, I'm unsure if I'll continue collecting the books in this range. The Second Edition rules are so vague and filled with "agree with the GM how this works" that I don't really see what the value of expansions could be.
As it stands, this book is probably going to be more something to decorate my shelf with than anything I use for actual gameplay.
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