I've read Hitchiker's Guide and I am currently reading Shaggy Planet. Both are what I would call Dark Comedy. This is a genre that is almost never seen in rpg-ing.
Well, there is Retief (he's the one competent member of the Terran Diplomatic Corp in a universe of often aggressive aliens, and backed up by bosses who range from the not quite getting it to the completely clueless and selfish. There are occasionally decent aliens...who tend to get abused also.) But Retief doesn't really fit because he's smart...unless you say Retief is a verser and its only indigs that are powerblocked from being competent.
How to do it:
1. Nobody seems to get truly enraged in these stories. I'm going to powerblock 'Fury'. In other words, you can't lose your temper, or stay coldly furious in these worlds.
You can be irritated, peeved, and annoyed, but righteous wrath just doesn't fit this genre.
Tadeusz would have a problem in this world.
2. Most people seem to be rather not quite competent. Thus all attributes above 1@10 and all skills above 1@10 are powerblocked.
This helps with the kind of befuddled, I'm sorta making up this as I go along atmosphere. No one has deep interior logic (no C.S. Lewis's) or profound spiritual calm. Also, thoughtful well-reasoned plans are right out.
3. No one has to work really that hard. It tends to be very high tech with robots. These people would tend to need robots around to do the jobs they are not competent to handle.
However such robots tend to be intelligent entitities with personality quirks. Marvin the Smartest Being in the universe naturally comes to mind.
You may consider Marvin an exception to the rule of IQ blocks, but based on his primary behaviour, I'm going to judge Marvin as that sort of lazy, know-it-all who doesn't really know that much at all who is happy to tell you just how brilliant they are with their woefully unconsidered opinions.
I might be wrong. Its been a long time since I read the books, but it fits with what I'm making here.
4. Lots of sudden and rather strange action. People get tossed off airships, have planets explode under them, get shot out of the sky because a cult of machine worshippers wants to eat them and worship their aircar....
Every few hours roll a 3d10. On a 'fifteen' a homicidal waitress tries to poison them to use their body for supper time steaks. On a roll of '30' the planet explodes with three minutes warning because a hyperdrive starship driven by a drunken Fox-girl (a fox genetically transformed into an intelligent being) crashes into the planet at 100X lightspeed.
5. Sapient beings with rather strange outlooks...either aliens, or genetically transformed humans or animals are common.
A. This needs to be rewritten to be better layed out.
B. If these stipulations make sense, a world based on them should be created.
EDIT: Let me add that the average attribute score in this world is 1@3.
One effect of this is there are no real leaders exemplars in any endeavor. There are no saintly sorts, no masters of logic, no Mona Lisa serene smiles...and a lot of people learn how to do things by watching those more successful at it. And a lot of the innovation in society comes from the best capable.
Nobody expects the leaders that do exist to demonstrate more than middling competence.
One other interesting effect, if you want to do this, send someone...like the Alchemist or Tadeusz with their high stats, high skills to this world, and strip them down to 1@10, and then watch them bumble about...
There was something called the US Camel Corps, and camels can be funny. If the Civil War had not happened, perhaps we might have had a widespread use of camels in the Old West.
So...Camels....slaves freed by being bought...the South is not economically destroyed by a vengeful North....the South takes leadership of the nation....Appalachians take leadership from the South....general rise of justice and less gamesmanship in capitalism allowed....no corporations (After all, corporations are an artificiall game playing aspect of capitalism enforced by state power)....
Power nets...like telephone systems are backward....but robot house cleaners are far advanced.....most people own camels as pets and as rides....perhaps genetically engineered to be stronger/faster. The nation is much more egalitarian, and rascism is a distant memory.
Everyone is highly individualized, and everyone has their own tech system...there are no standards, and no high culture. There is just a lot of expert handymen making do.
Its the early 21st century, and most people don't have to work.
======This alt-reality doesn't quite fit the preceding stipulations, but its interesting.
These look good; I have two challenges.
- You wrote:
Every few hours roll a 3d10. On a 'fifteen' a homicidal waitress tries to poison them to use their body for supper time steaks.
A GE of 15 is a "Not unfavorable result". Did you really mean an 18, "Not favorable result", or did you really mean that that being the target of a homicidal waitress was, relatively speaking, not a bad outcome? Also, what do you expect to do with all the good rolls this system generates? What kinds of good things happen on a 12, a 7, a 3? - You wrote:
Let me add that the average attribute score in this world is 1@3.
In a world in which the highest score is 1@10, anyone with a 1@10 score is identified as extraordinary. If the average attribute is 1@3, then a 1@5 looks pretty impressive to everyone else.One effect of this is there are no real leaders exemplars in any endeavor. There are no saintly sorts, no masters of logic, no Mona Lisa serene smiles....
Granted, these people would not be impressive in an interdimensional competition, but they do not have to be--they have to compete with each other, and those who are superior on the scale within the world will rise to the top.
The only way you can prevent there from being any "outstanding" individuals on the standard of the world is to cut the bell curve in half, as it were--most people in the world have the highest possible score, and although there are some who are less than that, there are none who are more. If 80% of everyone is a 1@5 at most things, and everyone else is lower, no one will appear outstanding. If you allow some people to be above the world average, those will be the outstanding people in that world, even though they would be insignificant in some other world.
It's the big fish in a small pond theory, really. It doesn't matter how big the biggest fish is, as long as it is bigger than all the other fish.
--M. J. Young
1. I meant homicidal waitress is a mid-range or 'favorable result'. Hmmm....perhaps the best way to do this is to say a single d10 of the 3d10 GE roll is fixed on "10", and that would resolve your second question which I'm not sure of the answer.
2. I meant with true special insight....outstanding is a bad word for what I meant. What happens when the brightest, toughest, and most intutive man on the planet is limited to 1@10 in all these categories. Worse, he has no brighter, wiser guy to learn from.
No Thomas Aquineas, no C.S. Lewis, no Einstein....your great leaders are instead rather small people. There are thoughts I think because some great leader explained it for me. Here the whole of the life of the mind, and of ambition, and technology, of physical power....is limited.
As a result, people are more corrupt, but in a petty minded small way (even the great scams require a man of genius). This is a world with little inspiration....probably little psi ability as well.
And petty minded corruptibles with delusions of adequacy can be the stuff of comedy. Surround the verser with people who don't quite get it, and have no wiser person to show them the way except for the 1@10 mayor who's selling pardons for traffic tickets.
I think a lot of small city-states would be the result too as no great dreams of pan-continental nation states survive in this world.
I hope that I clarified that.