Time Lord
Time Lord was/is a shortly lived roleplaying game based upon the TV series Doctor Who. It was published by Virgin and should not be confused with the FASA Dr Who game (about which I know nothing). It is no longer in print but nevertheless maintains an on line existence
The Good
Time Lord is good at presenting the general feeling of the Dr Who show. It is pretty hard for characters to die and it can be pretty jokey - for instance, character skills include bench-thumping (thumping the bench to make equipment work). However these unlikely skills also embody the dramatic license of the show allowing useful everyday object to appear out of pockets (voluminous pockets) and useful discoveries to be made at the appropriate moments (serendipity).My experience of running this game suggests that Dr Who fans (whether roleplayers or otherwise) get a lot of enjoyment out of it. I think it certainly succeeded in mimicking the series.
It has an interesting core system based on "beating the difference" between a D6 dice roll and a difficulty number, hence, if your skill is greater than the difficulty you automatically succeed.
The Bad
The introductory game that comes with the system is fussy and not terribly interesting. Also arguably too much of the book is taken up with either explaining Dr Who to roleplayers or explaining Roleplaying to Dr Who fans - this includes a lot of snippets of various bits of fiction which suggests that the writers might have had more than a little bit of frustrated novelist in them. Surely with a game like this the most likely audience is roleplaying Dr Who fans with possibly the odd Dr Who Fan buying to be completist. I doubt very much there was a large market among roleplayers who knew nothing about Dr Who. So a brief description of roleplaying should have been sufficient.My experience of running this game suggests that roleplayers steam-roller it - however I wasn't running it for anyone with much appreciation of or desire to emulate Dr Who.
A major drawback is that there is no really adequate system for character generation. Character sheets are given for all the Doctors and companions, and there are some general suggestions for creating your own characters, but nothing hard and fast. There are however, some web based extensions allowing characters to be generated on the Who RPG Mailing list Web Site