Showing posts with label Barbara Wright. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Barbara Wright. Show all posts

Monday 20 May 2013

DW Companions as PCs: Barbara Wright

Continuing from last time's look at Ian, let's turn to another of the original trio of companions: Barbara Wright.

Imagining that the first two seasons of the show had actually been an RPG, what can we say about Barbara? Knowing that the game is going to be about time travel, Barbara's player has decided that History skill will be particularly useful, and has built her character around this idea. However, clearly that won't be enough, since History is likely to be even less usable on alien planets than Ian's science skills will be in the past. So she saves plenty of points to round her character out with social skills.

As the campaign proceeds, this turns out to have been a good idea. They're particularly key in The Aztecs, in which she not only manages to carry off her masquerade as a goddess for most of the story, but, at one point, talks the bad guy out of revealing her secret when he sees through it. They also become more relevant when the show begins to focus more on the science fiction elements than on time-travelling into the past (as had been the original idea). From an RPG perspective, her History skill, good though it is, isn't always terribly helpful: it's fine for providing exposition in the TV show, and sometimes in working out what's going on, but, once the scene is set, it doesn't tend to move the plot along.