Dogs in the TARDIS

[RARodger]

Since my first reading of Dogs I've wanted to use it to run a Doctor Who game. But I haven't been able to come up with a planet progression for it. I know it has to have something to do with thinking of people as things and believing you can successfully control things. Or something. Does anyone have any suggestions?

[lumpley]

I haven't watched Doctor Who since the 1980s, so I have no clue, but:

Thinking of people as things and believing that you can control them is pride. It creates injustice, right? Injustice leads to a violatory power grab - either the victim of injustice crosses a line in pursuit of redress, or else the perpetrator of injustice becomes more bold and callous and so crosses a line herself. Either way it makes the planet socially unstable; bad luck or further escalation leads to a breakdown of society. To deal with this breakdown, people have to change their ethics and theories of behavior, they have to overthrow old relationships and build new ones. Someone will be better at this, more opportunistic and aggressive, than others; this person will (a) exploit the breakdown ruthlessly to her own advantage, and (b) bring along or attract followers, hangers on and thugs who hope to share the feast. Since this person's new current mode of action is based on instability and breakdown, she has to maintain instability and breakdown in order to maintain her power. This means murder: anyone who represents either a return to the old stability, or the creation of a new stability, has to go.

Unless there's something radically else going on in Doctor Who that I don't know about, which is likely enough, that's how I'd do it.

-Vincent