Running has been a very important part of Doctor Who for a very long time. Russell T. Davies knew this, and when he brought the series back in 2005, running was front and center, both on the screen and thematically. The very first word the Ninth Doctor utters is “Run!” and when he gets around to introducing himself the next scene, he repeats the concept: “I'm the Doctor, by the way. What's your name?” Rose replies, and the Doctor continues “Nice to meet you, Rose. Run for your life!” It’s a warning on multiple levels: first, of course, he’s telling Rose to get away from the upcoming explosion; however, he’s also telling her that if she wants to keep her ordinary life, she had better run far away from the Doctor; and if she enjoys running, she should run with him. Running continues as a central metaphor through the 9th and 10th Doctors’ tenure (more on that in a bit), but when Steven Moffat introduced the 11th Doctor, he put a different spin on the 9th Doctor’s introduction. At the end of “The Eleventh Hour,” the Doctor, finally in his iconic bowtie and thus, in a way, him for the first time, says “Hello. I’m the Doctor. Basically... run.” Instead of a warning, this time it’s a threat. For the first time, he’s standing in one place and telling his foes to escape his wrath. He echoes the same threat in “The Doctor’s Wife,” telling Uncle and Auntie “You gave me hope and then you took it away. That's enough to make anyone dangerous. God knows what it'll do to me. Basically, run!” This goes even further in “A Good Man Goes to War,” as the Doctor goes on the offensive and forces his enemy to take on the moniker “Colonel Runaway.” So with this primer, we can see that “running” can mean a number of different things in Doctor Who. Let’s examine some of the other implications.
Much is made of companions running away. Repeatedly, adventuring with the Doctor is referred to as a way to run away from your responsibilities in real life. This appears with Rose: she desperately wants to escape her humdrum life, and ends up never returning home. Martha at first runs away from a much more promising life than Rose had, but ends up deciding that she wants to return to her real life and become a doctor of her own. Donna is the most extreme example, as she is older but is in many ways the least mature of any of the new companions, and repeatedly says that she wants to travel with the Doctor forever, escaping her humdrum life for good. This, is of course, her greatest tragedy, as she ends up returning to not only her life but her mindset from before she met the Doctor.
Moving into the Moffat era, Amy also runs away with the Doctor, performing the ultimate “runaway bride”—her one night of cold feet turns into an intergalactic adventure. The “running away” theme for companions is minimized in Series 6 as Rory and Amy are simply enjoying their time, but it comes back with a vengeance in Series 7 as Rory and Amy have to balance their regular life with their adventures with the Doctor. Oddly enough, they come very close to choosing their real life, but end up choosing to stay with him, only to end up forcibly settling down in their last episod. This is also symbolized by the abandonment of Amy's surname Pond , as her last letter to the Doctor (and subsequent little references to her) are under the name Amelia Williams—but the significance of “Pond” is worth a whole other post. Clara is able to have it both ways: as the Doctor puts it, “The thing about a time machine is that you can run away all you like and still be back in time for tea.” She is able to maintain her regular life as a governess while simultaneously exploring new frontiers with the Doctor (this could be considered a cheat, and might be one reason why many fans are dissatisfied with Clara as a companion). However, the theme of running comes back with Clara in several ways: she repeats the phrase “Run, you clever boy” in all three of her incarnations, and then “The Name of the Doctor” reveals that “Always [she’s] running to save the Doctor. Again and again and again,” and what’s more, she’s been doing it “right from the day he started running.”
So we see that the Doctor does his share of running as well. From his actions, we can see that he prefers to run rather than fight all through the series, and he makes many references to “cowardice” being preferential to force. In “The Parting of the Ways,” the Ninth Doctor is asked “What are you? Coward, or killer?” and he responds “Coward. Any day.” In “The Impossible Astronaut,” Eleven refers to the little girl in the astronaut suit (the young River Song, of course) as “Incredibly strong and running away. I like her.” Donna lampshades his tendency to run with “He saves planets, rescues civilizations, defeats terrible creatures...and runs a lot. Seriously, there is an outrageous amount of running involved,” and River Song glorifies it in her first appearance by promising the Doctor “You and me, time and space. You watch us run!” Even when he doesn’t remember the minor character Lorna (or hasn’t met her yet) in “A Good Man Goes to War,” he assumes that “Hey, we ran, you and me. Didn't we run, Lorna?” And later in Moffat’s run, we start to see part of what the Doctor values in running: in “Let’s Kill Hitler,” he tells young Melody Pond/River Song “Don't run. Now I know you're scared. But never run when you're scared.”
So apparently he runs not out of fear. Why does he run? He tells Clara more in “The Rings of Akhaten”: “We don't walk away, but when we're holding onto something precious, we run, and we don't stop running until we're out of the shadows.” In one of his last episodes with Amy and Rory, the Doctor really explains why he’s running, and why he values it so highly: “I'm not running away. But this is one corner of one country on one continent on one planet that's a corner of a galaxy that's a corner of a universe that is forever growing and shrinking and creating and destroying and never remaining the same for a single millisecond, and there is so much, so much, to see, Amy. Because it goes so fast. I'm not running away from things, I am running to them. Before they flare and fade forever.”
However, despite what he says, there’s ample evidence that the Doctor, like his companions, is running from his past. In “The Sound of Drums,” he tells the story of young Gallifreyans looking into the “Untempered Schism.” He says “We stand there, eight years old, staring at the raw power of Time and Space, just a child. Some would be inspired. Some would run away. And some would go mad.” When Martha asks which was he, he replies “Oh, the ones that ran away! I never stopped.” To make brief mention of Classic Who, the Doctor was often said to be on the run from the Time Lords, from their society, their structures and strictures, and he wants to simply escape into the universe. He explicitly likens himself to Amy’s runaway bride schtick in “The Beast Below” as Amy asks him “Have you ever run away from something because you were scared, or not ready, or just... just because you could?” He replies “Once. A long time ago.” She asks what happened, and he just gestures to himself: “Hello!” He’s telling her that everything that is the Doctor came from that one moment of running away. He engages this again in “Let’s Kill Hitler,” trying to escape the reality of dying by pleading with Amy (or rather, a holographic interface wearing her face) “Let's run away and have adventures. Come along, Pond.”
As he is running from the society of the Time Lords, it’s said several times that the Doctor is also running from himself, from the deeds he’s done and what he’s capable of. In “Journey’s End,” Davros taunts him with the following words: “The Doctor. The man who keeps running, never looking back because he dare not, out of shame.” Dorium, in “The Wedding of River Song,” similarly tells him (in typical oblique Moffat fashion) what he’s running from: “The first question! The question that must never be answered! Hidden in plain sight! The question you've been running from all your life! Doctor Who? Doctor Who? Doc — tor — Who?!” While it’s not directly stated, it’s heavily implied in “The Name of the Doctor” that one thing the Doctor is running from is the actions of John Hurt’s Doctor, which he claims he “did without choice... in the name of peace and sanity,” but not “in the name of the Doctor.” Considering that fans suspect John Hurt’s character is the actual Ninth Doctor, who fought in the Time War between the 1996 TV movie and the 2005 Nu-Who resurrection, and that we know from “The End of Time” and “The Doctor’s Wife” that the Doctor locked Gallifrey away and killed all the Time Lords, this tells us a lot about what he’s running from.
In “The Wedding of River Song,” he asks Dorium “I've been running all my life. Why should I stop?” That question of why should he stop, and what happens when he does, has been addressed several times. Shortly after the conversation with Dorium (though earlier in broadcast time), the Doctor tells Amy and Rory “I've been running. Faster than I've ever run. And I've been running my whole life. Now it's time for me to stop.” He’s finally decided to take a stand, and similarly tells River that he “Did run. Running brought me here.” And we have seen what happens when he’s forced to take a stand, unable to run any longer. In “The Runaway Bride,” among many other episodes, he kills the monster of the week without mercy once he can no longer run or talk his way out of things. The best example of this, however, appears in “The Family of Blood.” The Doctor had been running harder than most times, going so far as to hide as a human, to avoid the Family. But at the end of the episode, it’s revealed, in the words of Son-of-Mine, “we discovered why — why this Doctor, who had fought with gods and demons, why he had run away from us and hidden. He was being kind.” His vengeance against the Family is terrible, as he traps them all in eternal torture. So in a sense, the Doctor can be said to be running from himself, from what he is capable of.
As we can see, running shows up a lot in Doctor Who, especially in the Moffat era, and it has a number of different implications: running away from real life, running away from the past, running away from danger (both what could hurt the Doctor and those he could hurt)—and running towards excitement and adventure. That one simple word, one simple activity, is thematically all over Nu-Who, and interpreted in many different ways.
THE DIVIDING LINE
So what does this have to do with gaming in Fate? Obviously, running must appear in an aspect on the Doctor's sheet , many of the companions' character sheets, and really on the game as a whole. Running is almost always the right answer: characters who try to stand and fight, use bullets, seldom make it to the end of the episode. This is a good example of a game aspect. A Doctor Who campaign would need some aspects about running in order to properly reference the source material, while a campaign about strong knights of Camelot defending their home against an implacable foe might go the other way and have several aspects on the game, locations, and characters that emphasize “standing your ground.” In Strange Voyages, exploration in some fashion or questions of the truth are likely to be aspects that will appear in many games. The Kerboros Club does a great job emphasizing their setting by saying that whatever other game aspects there are, “Malum Necessarium,” the club motto, will always appear. This emphasizes the theme of its English translation, "necessary evil." Characters do what they have to do, and don't always stay on the side of the angels. Similarly, the Atomic Robo RPG (coming soon) has “Remain Calm and Trust In Science” appearing as the “mission statement” aspect of Tesladyne, and thus will always appear. Like running in Doctor Who, this tells us that the answer to an Atomic Robo problem will nearly always rely on science in some fashion.
This sort of thematic aspect can be used in a number of ways: they can be invoked in almost any circumstance where acting in accordance with the aspect gives a bonus, and thus it encourages characters to act that way. If the characters in Doctor Who attempt to run away, they will be able to gain a bonus do so, whereas they won’t if they choose to fight back. Of course, the second way you can use these aspects is through compels, either from the GM or self-compels to stay in the correct "tone" for the game, and even when Doctor Who players want to stand their ground, they can be encouraged through compels to run.. Finally, these thematic aspects give you a sense of what stories to tell. The Doctor Who GM quickly realizes not to tell stories where is necessary for the characters to stand their ground, and instead to make scenarios that explore why the companions are running away from their real-life; the Camelot game should conversely tell stories where characters will have to stand and fight, and explore why their characters need to stand and what that costs them; a Strange Voyages game should focus on stories of exploration, new things and new locations, with stories that explore why the characters are exploring in the first place. Creating a thematic aspect like this can be as simple as placing it on the game as issue, or it could add on to the game above and beyond the issues that are already there (as in the case of The Kerberos Club and Atomic Robo), and can also be encouraged to be reflected in the aspects of PCs and various faces and places throughout the campaign. How far you want to take this depends on how much you want to emphasize the theme—how far you want to run.
Much is made of companions running away. Repeatedly, adventuring with the Doctor is referred to as a way to run away from your responsibilities in real life. This appears with Rose: she desperately wants to escape her humdrum life, and ends up never returning home. Martha at first runs away from a much more promising life than Rose had, but ends up deciding that she wants to return to her real life and become a doctor of her own. Donna is the most extreme example, as she is older but is in many ways the least mature of any of the new companions, and repeatedly says that she wants to travel with the Doctor forever, escaping her humdrum life for good. This, is of course, her greatest tragedy, as she ends up returning to not only her life but her mindset from before she met the Doctor.
Moving into the Moffat era, Amy also runs away with the Doctor, performing the ultimate “runaway bride”—her one night of cold feet turns into an intergalactic adventure. The “running away” theme for companions is minimized in Series 6 as Rory and Amy are simply enjoying their time, but it comes back with a vengeance in Series 7 as Rory and Amy have to balance their regular life with their adventures with the Doctor. Oddly enough, they come very close to choosing their real life, but end up choosing to stay with him, only to end up forcibly settling down in their last episod. This is also symbolized by the abandonment of Amy's surname Pond , as her last letter to the Doctor (and subsequent little references to her) are under the name Amelia Williams—but the significance of “Pond” is worth a whole other post. Clara is able to have it both ways: as the Doctor puts it, “The thing about a time machine is that you can run away all you like and still be back in time for tea.” She is able to maintain her regular life as a governess while simultaneously exploring new frontiers with the Doctor (this could be considered a cheat, and might be one reason why many fans are dissatisfied with Clara as a companion). However, the theme of running comes back with Clara in several ways: she repeats the phrase “Run, you clever boy” in all three of her incarnations, and then “The Name of the Doctor” reveals that “Always [she’s] running to save the Doctor. Again and again and again,” and what’s more, she’s been doing it “right from the day he started running.”
So we see that the Doctor does his share of running as well. From his actions, we can see that he prefers to run rather than fight all through the series, and he makes many references to “cowardice” being preferential to force. In “The Parting of the Ways,” the Ninth Doctor is asked “What are you? Coward, or killer?” and he responds “Coward. Any day.” In “The Impossible Astronaut,” Eleven refers to the little girl in the astronaut suit (the young River Song, of course) as “Incredibly strong and running away. I like her.” Donna lampshades his tendency to run with “He saves planets, rescues civilizations, defeats terrible creatures...and runs a lot. Seriously, there is an outrageous amount of running involved,” and River Song glorifies it in her first appearance by promising the Doctor “You and me, time and space. You watch us run!” Even when he doesn’t remember the minor character Lorna (or hasn’t met her yet) in “A Good Man Goes to War,” he assumes that “Hey, we ran, you and me. Didn't we run, Lorna?” And later in Moffat’s run, we start to see part of what the Doctor values in running: in “Let’s Kill Hitler,” he tells young Melody Pond/River Song “Don't run. Now I know you're scared. But never run when you're scared.”
So apparently he runs not out of fear. Why does he run? He tells Clara more in “The Rings of Akhaten”: “We don't walk away, but when we're holding onto something precious, we run, and we don't stop running until we're out of the shadows.” In one of his last episodes with Amy and Rory, the Doctor really explains why he’s running, and why he values it so highly: “I'm not running away. But this is one corner of one country on one continent on one planet that's a corner of a galaxy that's a corner of a universe that is forever growing and shrinking and creating and destroying and never remaining the same for a single millisecond, and there is so much, so much, to see, Amy. Because it goes so fast. I'm not running away from things, I am running to them. Before they flare and fade forever.”
However, despite what he says, there’s ample evidence that the Doctor, like his companions, is running from his past. In “The Sound of Drums,” he tells the story of young Gallifreyans looking into the “Untempered Schism.” He says “We stand there, eight years old, staring at the raw power of Time and Space, just a child. Some would be inspired. Some would run away. And some would go mad.” When Martha asks which was he, he replies “Oh, the ones that ran away! I never stopped.” To make brief mention of Classic Who, the Doctor was often said to be on the run from the Time Lords, from their society, their structures and strictures, and he wants to simply escape into the universe. He explicitly likens himself to Amy’s runaway bride schtick in “The Beast Below” as Amy asks him “Have you ever run away from something because you were scared, or not ready, or just... just because you could?” He replies “Once. A long time ago.” She asks what happened, and he just gestures to himself: “Hello!” He’s telling her that everything that is the Doctor came from that one moment of running away. He engages this again in “Let’s Kill Hitler,” trying to escape the reality of dying by pleading with Amy (or rather, a holographic interface wearing her face) “Let's run away and have adventures. Come along, Pond.”
As he is running from the society of the Time Lords, it’s said several times that the Doctor is also running from himself, from the deeds he’s done and what he’s capable of. In “Journey’s End,” Davros taunts him with the following words: “The Doctor. The man who keeps running, never looking back because he dare not, out of shame.” Dorium, in “The Wedding of River Song,” similarly tells him (in typical oblique Moffat fashion) what he’s running from: “The first question! The question that must never be answered! Hidden in plain sight! The question you've been running from all your life! Doctor Who? Doctor Who? Doc — tor — Who?!” While it’s not directly stated, it’s heavily implied in “The Name of the Doctor” that one thing the Doctor is running from is the actions of John Hurt’s Doctor, which he claims he “did without choice... in the name of peace and sanity,” but not “in the name of the Doctor.” Considering that fans suspect John Hurt’s character is the actual Ninth Doctor, who fought in the Time War between the 1996 TV movie and the 2005 Nu-Who resurrection, and that we know from “The End of Time” and “The Doctor’s Wife” that the Doctor locked Gallifrey away and killed all the Time Lords, this tells us a lot about what he’s running from.
In “The Wedding of River Song,” he asks Dorium “I've been running all my life. Why should I stop?” That question of why should he stop, and what happens when he does, has been addressed several times. Shortly after the conversation with Dorium (though earlier in broadcast time), the Doctor tells Amy and Rory “I've been running. Faster than I've ever run. And I've been running my whole life. Now it's time for me to stop.” He’s finally decided to take a stand, and similarly tells River that he “Did run. Running brought me here.” And we have seen what happens when he’s forced to take a stand, unable to run any longer. In “The Runaway Bride,” among many other episodes, he kills the monster of the week without mercy once he can no longer run or talk his way out of things. The best example of this, however, appears in “The Family of Blood.” The Doctor had been running harder than most times, going so far as to hide as a human, to avoid the Family. But at the end of the episode, it’s revealed, in the words of Son-of-Mine, “we discovered why — why this Doctor, who had fought with gods and demons, why he had run away from us and hidden. He was being kind.” His vengeance against the Family is terrible, as he traps them all in eternal torture. So in a sense, the Doctor can be said to be running from himself, from what he is capable of.
As we can see, running shows up a lot in Doctor Who, especially in the Moffat era, and it has a number of different implications: running away from real life, running away from the past, running away from danger (both what could hurt the Doctor and those he could hurt)—and running towards excitement and adventure. That one simple word, one simple activity, is thematically all over Nu-Who, and interpreted in many different ways.
THE DIVIDING LINE
So what does this have to do with gaming in Fate? Obviously, running must appear in an aspect on the Doctor's sheet , many of the companions' character sheets, and really on the game as a whole. Running is almost always the right answer: characters who try to stand and fight, use bullets, seldom make it to the end of the episode. This is a good example of a game aspect. A Doctor Who campaign would need some aspects about running in order to properly reference the source material, while a campaign about strong knights of Camelot defending their home against an implacable foe might go the other way and have several aspects on the game, locations, and characters that emphasize “standing your ground.” In Strange Voyages, exploration in some fashion or questions of the truth are likely to be aspects that will appear in many games. The Kerboros Club does a great job emphasizing their setting by saying that whatever other game aspects there are, “Malum Necessarium,” the club motto, will always appear. This emphasizes the theme of its English translation, "necessary evil." Characters do what they have to do, and don't always stay on the side of the angels. Similarly, the Atomic Robo RPG (coming soon) has “Remain Calm and Trust In Science” appearing as the “mission statement” aspect of Tesladyne, and thus will always appear. Like running in Doctor Who, this tells us that the answer to an Atomic Robo problem will nearly always rely on science in some fashion.
This sort of thematic aspect can be used in a number of ways: they can be invoked in almost any circumstance where acting in accordance with the aspect gives a bonus, and thus it encourages characters to act that way. If the characters in Doctor Who attempt to run away, they will be able to gain a bonus do so, whereas they won’t if they choose to fight back. Of course, the second way you can use these aspects is through compels, either from the GM or self-compels to stay in the correct "tone" for the game, and even when Doctor Who players want to stand their ground, they can be encouraged through compels to run.. Finally, these thematic aspects give you a sense of what stories to tell. The Doctor Who GM quickly realizes not to tell stories where is necessary for the characters to stand their ground, and instead to make scenarios that explore why the companions are running away from their real-life; the Camelot game should conversely tell stories where characters will have to stand and fight, and explore why their characters need to stand and what that costs them; a Strange Voyages game should focus on stories of exploration, new things and new locations, with stories that explore why the characters are exploring in the first place. Creating a thematic aspect like this can be as simple as placing it on the game as issue, or it could add on to the game above and beyond the issues that are already there (as in the case of The Kerberos Club and Atomic Robo), and can also be encouraged to be reflected in the aspects of PCs and various faces and places throughout the campaign. How far you want to take this depends on how much you want to emphasize the theme—how far you want to run.
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