which systems would you recommend for a "doctor who"-style scifi monster-of-the-week with a ragtag bunch of misfits? any and all recommendations welcome, from the staid to the esoteric!
There are a number of actual Doctor Who RPGs, both official and fan-made, but I wouldn’t necessarily recommend any of them if you’re just aiming for the style of Doctor Who – the official ones tend to have the Doctor-and-companion model baked into their mechanics in a way that’s annoying to work around if your party composition doesn’t match that assumption.
If you don’t mind the whole shared-narrative-authority deal, you might have a look at Rose Bailey’s Beautiful Anomalies. Like many of Rose Bailey’s games, it use a print-and-play card deck for randomisation rather than dice, with a novel “timeline” mechanic in which the GM’s hand is constructed face-up on the table out of the players’ discards, creating a very fun tactical tension where the benefit of spending a powerful card is balanced against the fact that doing so will eventually place it in the GM’s hand.
(Note that there is a second edition of Beautiful Anomalies in the works, but there’s no estimated release date at the time of this posting.)
If you’d prefer something with more dice and less meta-narrative goofiness*, and if Fate Core isn’t a dealbreaker, you might have a look at the Atomic Robo RPG. When applied to Doctor Who it definitely leans strongly toward the goofier seasons, but it’s perfectly playable with lower-powered characters if you limit access to mega-stunts, and the brainstorming rules (where characters can score mechanical bonuses by engaging in wild speculation about what exactly they’re up against) are an excellent fit for the premise. Alternatively, if you’re cool with Fate but want something that’s better suited to the tone of the more down-to-Earth seasons, there’s Time and Fate, a Fate Accelerated Edition hack of the aforementioned Beautiful Anomalies – though it has no public release at the time of this posting, so you’d have to drop a couple of bucks on the author’s Patreon to get your hands on a copy.
* But not, alas, no meta-narrative goofiness; meta-narrative goofiness is kind of a thing on this blog.
Finally, if you don’t mind a system that really wants to pigeonhole you into playing characters from the show (or very close expies thereof), the Cubicle 7 edition of the official Doctor Who RPG is a perfectly serviceable game, and it’ll save you the trouble of having to come up with your own stat blocks if you want to feature critters from the show as antagonists. It’s a bit pricey, though, presumably due to the expense of the license; the PDF costs more than some games will charge for a printed book.