[Social Engineering] "I could bring down your Government with six words."

wellspring · 12-20-2016, 02:55 PM

I might consider this as a use of a significant number of Impulse Points (a la serendipity). IE a limited retcon of a non-antagonist NPC's political position. I'm not sure a PC would ever have that much luck/fate/joss/karma available for them to spend.

A lot of it depends on how you perceive what the Doctor did.

One possibility is that while arguing with the PM, the Doctor was aware of the historically precarious position she was in. Either due to his knowledge of her future history or his Time Lord sense of the stability of particular historical facts in the timestream. If you go with that, then she's in a dangerous position and doesn't realize it, so the Doctor's threat is to take advantage of that situation that he perceives and she doesn't. (In other words, he can't topple PMs whenever he wants; he only made the threat because there was this uncommon opportunity to carry it out.)

The next possibility is that this was some kind of infectious mind-control on her subordinates or head fakery against her. In other words some kind of (possibly psi or psi-assisted) social attack.

Or he used his Time Lord powers to know the precise way to change history at a given time. Remember the one where the Doctor changes into a normal human but then when a kid is endangered he throws and apple and a complex series of events kicks off that results in the kid being saved due to that perfect throw at the right moment? He might simply be using some kind of super-precog ability to know exactly how to act to reshape history in a given moment.

I suppose there's a fourth possibility: off-camera he uses the TARDIS to fly back in time and set up the conditions for her fall off-camera and unbeknownst to her.

Doctor Who is inconsistent enough that it could be any of these. The problem with abilities like this is that they're so hard to define that it's very hard to make it work from a game balance point of view. It might as well be magic and what magic he can do in this episode might not have anything to do with what magic he can do in the next.

(And yes this was a case of Ten's worst moment. The deed is done, for better or for worse. Ten admits that she's a great PM. And he doesn't tear her down, he threatens her basically if she doesn't grovel and beg forgiveness. Then in a later episode he admits he was wrong. So basically it was a case of a temper tantrum of his personal moral aesthetics causing him to upend an entire civilization. In other words, the Doctor was vindicating exactly what his enemies' critique of him is.

12-20-2016, 02:55 PM	#16
wellspring Join Date: Apr 2011	Re: [Social Engineering] "I could bring down your Government with six words." I might consider this as a use of a significant number of Impulse Points (a la serendipity). IE a limited retcon of a non-antagonist NPC's political position. I'm not sure a PC would ever have that much luck/fate/joss/karma available for them to spend. A lot of it depends on how you perceive what the Doctor did. One possibility is that while arguing with the PM, the Doctor was aware of the historically precarious position she was in. Either due to his knowledge of her future history or his Time Lord sense of the stability of particular historical facts in the timestream. If you go with that, then she's in a dangerous position and doesn't realize it, so the Doctor's threat is to take advantage of that situation that he perceives and she doesn't. (In other words, he can't topple PMs whenever he wants; he only made the threat because there was this uncommon opportunity to carry it out.) The next possibility is that this was some kind of infectious mind-control on her subordinates or head fakery against her. In other words some kind of (possibly psi or psi-assisted) social attack. Or he used his Time Lord powers to know the precise way to change history at a given time. Remember the one where the Doctor changes into a normal human but then when a kid is endangered he throws and apple and a complex series of events kicks off that results in the kid being saved due to that perfect throw at the right moment? He might simply be using some kind of super-precog ability to know exactly how to act to reshape history in a given moment. I suppose there's a fourth possibility: off-camera he uses the TARDIS to fly back in time and set up the conditions for her fall off-camera and unbeknownst to her. Doctor Who is inconsistent enough that it could be any of these. The problem with abilities like this is that they're so hard to define that it's very hard to make it work from a game balance point of view. It might as well be magic and what magic he can do in this episode might not have anything to do with what magic he can do in the next. (And yes this was a case of Ten's worst moment. The deed is done, for better or for worse. Ten admits that she's a great PM. And he doesn't tear her down, he threatens her basically if she doesn't grovel and beg forgiveness. Then in a later episode he admits he was wrong. So basically it was a case of a temper tantrum of his personal moral aesthetics causing him to upend an entire civilization. In other words, the Doctor was vindicating exactly what his enemies' critique of him is.