The Roleplaying Game: Second Edition

Doctor Who: The Roleplaying Game - Second Edition is a revised edition of the the award-winning roleplaying game by Cubicle 7. It was released in PDF format on 30 July 2021, with a physical release planned for "Q2 2022". In addition to this, a Collector's Edition of the book with a specially-designed slipcase was also announced.

Built upon the Vortex System, originally created for the First Edition of the game, it made several significant changes and modifications to the rules while remaining backwards-compatible with sourcebooks from the previous edition.

Publisher summary
The award-winning Doctor Who: The Roleplaying Game has regenerated into a new Second Edition that is faster, easier, and even more exciting. This book presents all the rules and background you need to voyage across space and time with the Doctor, or as new characters experiencing brand new epic adventures.

This core rulebook includes:

The complete revised rules for playing Doctor Who: The Roleplaying Game. The new and updated version of the popular Vortex system is completely
 * Complete character creation rules to allow you to bring to life a new time travelling adventurer to explore space and time aboard the TARDIS. They could be companions to the Doctor, or a new Time Lord of your own creation, Time Agents, or investigators and defenders of planet Earth.
 * compatible with the First Edition of the game. Second Edition makes gameplay faster, easier, and quicker to learn, while keeping all of the dramatic action you’d expect from an episode of Doctor Who.
 * Advice for Gamemasters, new and old, on how to make the experience of Doctor Who: The Roleplaying Game feel like you’re living an episode of the TV series, as well as how to create exciting storylines and continuing campaigns.
 * Revised rules for creating your group’s own TARDIS, or other time travel device to allow them to adventure from the dawn of history to the very ends of the Universe.
 * An expansive look at the history of the Universe, detailing many of the aliens and creatures the Doctor has encountered across space and time.
 * Pregenerated character sheets for the Doctor and her companions, ready to play straight away!

Game mechanics
Like the the previous edition, a group of players took the role of characters while a single player, the Gamemaster, described the scenario and the consequences of the players' actions.

Players had six Attributes - Awareness, Coordination, Ingenuity, Presence, Resolve and Strength - and twelve Skills - Athletics, Conflict, Convince, Craft, Intuition, Knowledge, Medicine, Science, Subterfuge, Survival, Technology and Transport. When a player declared an intended action, the Gamemaster determined the difficulty of the task, then selected an Attribute and a Skill for the player. The player would then roll two six-sided dice, and add the total to the Attribute and Skill scores. The degree of success or failure was determined by how far above or below the set difficulty the total was. Other variables may increase or decrease the difficulty of the task.

As an example, a character trying to scale a fence may need to roll for Strength and Athletics, with a difficulty of 12. A roll of 12 or higher would result in their scaling the fence, while a score lower than 12 would result in failure.

Significant changes were made to the mechanics compared to those of the previous edition. Previously, characters had Traits in addition to Skills and Attributes. Traits provided flavor and, in many cases, modified rolls for better or worse. Several dozen Traits were provided by various sourcebooks for the first edition. In the Second Edition, Traits were removed entirely, replaced instead with Distinctions for more important Traits.

Skills were also simplified, with the previous combat-focused Skills of Fighting and Marksman merged into a single Skill called Conflict. A new Skill, Intuition, was added, described by the core rulebook as "[covering] the trained ability to spot things, notice those discrepancies that reveal the hidden, and the body language that betrays a lie." Functionally, Intuition was similar to the Insight skill in Dungeons & Dragons.

Additionally, characters may take a Specialisation for their Skills depending on how many points that Skill has. This is similar to Expertise in the first edition, but is more formalised with specific rules for their application. For instance, Specialisations for the aforementioned Intuition Skill include Empathy and Insight.

The design of the character sheet has been simplified, allowing more room for character background such as short- and long-term goals, notable experiences from the character's history, and a space for conditions, described by the rulebook as "a negative status that the character gains that has an impact on how well they can do things in future."

In addition to the rule changes, the second edition contains instructions for how to convert characters from the first edition of the game into the second, allowing existing games and campaigns to continue without having to rebuild characters from scratch.