About seven years ago, I was approached by my friend Ben Paddon with a simple yet fantastic question. They were putting together a cast for a podcast, a Doctor Who podcast telling new and original fan content stories about the Doctor, and they wanted to know if I’d be interested in joining. As an American woman unlikely to find herself in any BBC audition rooms any time soon, it felt like the closest I would ever get to the Doctor opening the door to the TARDIS and asking me to run away with them, after I remarked upon the difference in size from the inside versus the out, obviously. So of course, I agreed.
The show, Game of Rassilon, has just launched its fifth and final season. We use the actual play RPG format, which for those of you whose eyes just glazed over means we play a tabletop roleplaying game for an audience, a format popularized by shows like The Adventure Zone, Dimension 20, and especially Critical Role. While many shows use Dungeons & Dragons as their game format, we use the licensed Doctor Who game system published by Cubicle 7. For those who still don’t know what I mean, let me just say we improvise the show with the aid of some dice.
I have been present in nerdy spaces since I was a kid, but aside from the occasional blushy bit of slash fanfic, I’ve never really actively created fan content for audience consumption. I’ve analyzed, editorialized, criticized, and of course fantasized, but that was as far as I’d gotten. But over the last five seasons, we’ve crafted dozens of episodes, developed our own internal canon, and faced off against our own original alien concepts. We’ve even found some fun takes on a few classic monsters as well. I had no idea at the time just how much this would change my own relationship with the show. I didn’t know what it means to suddenly be a creator, even in an entirely unofficial, not-for-profit capacity, of one of your most favorite things in the universe.
Through fortune and some pragmatism, I ended up not only joining the show’s cast but actually playing the Doctor. Knowing that I will never be cast as the Doctor on the BBC series Doctor Who, I decided this was my one opportunity to truly embrace the excitement and joy of creating my Doctor from the ground up. It was important for me to establish that she looked like me. I wanted it to be as if I had been cast to play her in some alternate Earth. I don’t know if I’ll ever see the Doctor regenerate into a trans woman in my lifetime but I got to make that happen in our quirky little pocket universe.
I imagined my trip to Ray Holman’s costume studio to determine her look, which landed somewhere in the realm of ‘90s riot girl: Doc Martens, space buns, and pleated skirts, but never without the important long jacket. Like Matt Smith pulling inspiration from Patrick Troughton, I used Tom Baker’s Doctor’s character sheet from the game and then modified it to fit my Doctor’s vibe. While I never quite nailed the accent, I committed to an attempt at a vaguely Northern English, because while I sing the praises of diverse Doctor casting, the one thing I cannot abide is the Doctor having an American accent. These were all things that I’d imagined for years already. The toybox you get to dive into when you become the Doctor.
What I had never really thought about is how hard being the Doctor actually is. One particularly major difference between playing the Doctor in a roleplaying game versus acting in a role on the TV show is that presumably, the writers give the actors the script. Every Doctor from William Hartnell through Ncuti Gatwa can feel confident that the person who wrote the monsters’ plan also wrote the solution that their Doctor will unfurl.
In the RPG, the mystery or challenge of the story is a web of secrets hidden behind a screen. You do not know the solution, you are thrown into a scenario, and you have to figure it out, or else the Sea Devils are going to flood the Earth. Playing the Doctor on Game of Rassilon is like undergoing immersion therapy for impostor syndrome. It means constantly entering a situation where you are intended to be the smartest person in the universe, to know what is happening, why, and how to stop it, all while never letting on that you have absolutely no clue. I may still have impostor syndrome but now I’m very good at being a passable impostor.
Playing the Doctor in this way had another completely unexpected side effect for me. Where other roleplaying games might have you charging into scenarios with weapons dawn and spells flying, as the Doctor you should strive to always enter with an open mind and a pair of hearts on your sleeve. (But there are still Daleks so also be ready to run.) Game after game, week after week, I needed to be able to try my best to de-escalate as a first option. I had to figure out on the fly how to get two sides to put aside their differences and talk. I had to hold firm to my character’s commitment to empathy even when my greatest enemy tried to bring me to the edge.
I had to give so many speeches. This may have, in fact, been one of the most challenging, if self-imposed, aspects of playing the Doctor. I love Doctor speeches so much, so it felt important to me to never phone them in. Especially because we were playing for an audience. In a home game around a table, I might have gotten away with just making a dice roll for “presence and convince” to see if my Doctor’s speech was stirring enough. But no. We have listeners. So I put in the effort each and every time to consider my words and imagine how well my Doctor was playing those heartstrings.
So many times over the last several years since starting the show, I’ve found myself upset about a situation in my real life and somewhere in my frustration, I’ll hear that little tiny voice in the back of my subconscious. She’s there sounding (poorly) like she’s from the North, pushing me to just try and look at it from the other way around. I’m not perfect, I still mess up a lot, but I do feel like living in the Doctor’s Doc Martens for just a few years has fortified my attempts to be better, do better, and engage the world in a more gentle and caring way.
At the end of our third season, I made the choice to have my Doctor regenerate. Since then, I’ve switched chairs from Doctor to Gamemaster (well, Gamemissy). This means that rather than the Doctor, I’ve taken on the role of head storyteller for the show. To put this into show terms, this would be like if after regenerating into Matt Smith, David Tennant had stayed on to be the head writer for the next season. Suddenly I went from solving the mysteries to actually being responsible for crafting narratives for the show with the aid of our producer Michael Nixon, and running them for Ben and our other cast members, Châu Kate Lê, and Dan Peck, as the new Doctor, affectionately called the Dan!Doctor by our listeners.
The very first thing I wrote for the show was the tail end of the regeneration scene, every word of description following the exact second where my Doctor became Dan’s. It was my choice to do it that way, it was my way of forcing myself to let the character go. And it meant my first moment had to be about saying goodbye but also welcoming someone new into the space, free to take it and run with it how he would. It forced me to move out of the headspace of centering myself in the stories as the Doctor and build a runway for someone else.
Writing for a Doctor Who story where the Doctor is controlled by another person feels like being the antagonistic architect of their triumph. You enter every story so excited for them to work it out, so excited for him to have that moment where a solution clicks into place, and then you must spend every bit of energy you have trying to prevent them from doing it. You’re building the maze around them as they work their way to the prize. It’s an exercise in trust. You’re asking someone to enter such a staggeringly brilliant and compassionate character’s mind and in return, you have to meet that with a scenario where they always get to prove it. And they always do. In wild, outlandish, and maddeningly beautiful ways, you get to watch them undo every universe-ending obstacle you place in their path.
The joy I’ve gotten from seeing the Dan!Doctor and his TARDIS Team working out some of the plots Michael and I have thrown their way have been some of the most satisfying moments of collaboration in my entire career as a writer and creator. It’s not without frustration at times, and there are likely hours of audio footage on the cutting room floor of moments where I’m rubbing my temples and trying to explain that, no, absolutely no one believes you’re sneaking around this fictional IKEA because you’re a secret shopper, no matter how many times you repeat it. But overall I love my wild little crew and I get such glee from seeing them destroy everything I’ve built.
We’re bringing the show to an end this year, like every Doctor and every showrunner there comes a time when it’s right to bow out. But I will never forget doing this show. I’ve said many times in my life that Doctor Who has made me a better and more empathetic person. Watching the show certainly called me to do so. But living in the character’s mind and crafting challenges for them to solve has forced me to fully immerse myself in the way she approaches the world. It’s a mindspace I’ve tapped into so many times that it has left an indelible mark on my soul. A popular quote from the series is “I will always remember when the Doctor was me,” but thanks to this show, and this team of people I’ve collaborated with on it, I will always remember when the Doctor was mine.
© 2023 Riley Silverman
