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[Event Proposal] Fanfiction Trivia Contest

What time would you prefer for the contest to take place?

  • March 2022

    Votes: 2 20.0%
  • During the 3rd Anniversary Celebration (April 23rd 2022 to early May)

    Votes: 7 70.0%
  • June 2022

    Votes: 4 40.0%
  • July 2022

    Votes: 4 40.0%
  • August 2022

    Votes: 4 40.0%

  • Total voters
    10
  • Poll closed .

The Walrein

Vicinal Dragging for the Truth
Partners
  1. gulpin
  2. kricketot
  3. bulbasaur
So, I've had this idea knocking around my head for a fanfiction trivia contest based on National Academic Quiz Tournament's quizbowl format. Here's the gist of it:

-The contest would be a live event held on the voice channel in the Thousand Roads Discord. Depending on the amount of people interested in participating, the contest could be between either individuals or small teams, and there might be multiple games scheduled for different times.

-Each game of the contest would have twenty questions, which would be read aloud by the host of the event (presumably me, The Walrein). The answer to each question would be the name of a story posted here on the Thousand Roads forum.

-Questions would consist of a description of the story in question, starting by stating relatively obscure facts about the story before moving on to increasingly more general descriptions. This allows players who have a better familiarity with the story in question to answer first, rewarding deep as well as broad knowledge of TR story trivia.

-An example question for my story Groudon's Map might look like this: "Time is measured in megaseconds and gigaseconds in this story, which also features the destruction of two mountains and Mew manipulating the orbit of the moon. Set during the creation of the world, it suggests that the reason for version differences in Pokemon availability is due to there being two copies of every region, save for a land implied to be Ransei, the existence of which persuades Arceus to spare the world from remaking. For 10 points, name this one-shot by The Walrein where Groudon is tasked by Mew to create maps of all the world's continents."

-All questions are worth 10 points if answered correctly; the "for 10 points" part is included in every question as a quizbowl tradition.

-To answer a question, participants would "buzz in" by simply entering the word 'buzz' in a thread of the text-for-voice channel of the Discord, and then can answer either by text or voice. Players can interrupt the reading of the question to answer, although getting a question wrong after interrupting it in this way carries a 5 point penalty. Each team can only attempt to answer each question once, and only the player on the team who buzzed in is allowed to answer.

-Real quizbowl features 'bonus' questions that can be answered by the team who got the primary question each round; however, out of a desire to keep things simple for the first time the event is run, there will be no bonus questions in this game.

-I don't have any prizes planned for the winners right now, but if there's enough interest I might see about financing some art commissions.

As for who would write the questions, I was thinking that this could be crowdsourced! Any author who wanted to have their story featured in the competition could PM me a question they wrote for their story. This would help guarantee accuracy of the clues in each question and let authors decide on what details about the story they're comfortable with having revealed. If not enough authors provide questions for a complete game, I could try asking some authors if they'd be okay with me or other volunteers writing a question for one of their stories, with the author in question having to approve the question written before it gets included into the game.

Don't start sending in questions yet; right now I just want to get an idea of how many people would be interested in an event like this, as well as what the best time period to run the games would be. Once more details are sorted out, I'll write up some guidelines for writing questions. Feel free to respond to this thread to let me know if you're interested or have any suggestions for how the game should be run.
 
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Negrek

Play the Rain
Staff
I think this sounds like fun! I've considered running something similar on occasion myself. I'd be interested in participating!

This could probably work during the anniversary if you wanted to try it then. Other than that, there would probably be time in either March or sometime over the summer.

A couple of logistics questions:

- I'm guessing there'd be no "reading list" known ahead of time, so people would have no particular way to prepare before the event (aside from reading as many stories, in general, as possible)?

- About how many questions would you need?

- Similarly, how many guessers would you be looking for, at minimum?

- Can authors with multiple stories submit only one question overall? Can they submit questions for multiple stories they've written?
 

K_S

Unrepentent Giovanni and Rocket fan
Also can we submit questions for tales not our own? Wildboots 'crow and a few other have rich detail and lore centric stories and it might be fun to offer questions on those tales as well as our own...

Also since I cant discord for the forseeable future may I offer my services as a reviewer if reviews are added to the prize pool?
 

The Walrein

Vicinal Dragging for the Truth
Partners
  1. gulpin
  2. kricketot
  3. bulbasaur
I'm glad that this is getting so much interest so far! I've added a poll to the first post for what times people would prefer the event to be run at; note that you can select multiple options.

- I'm guessing there'd be no "reading list" known ahead of time, so people would have no particular way to prepare before the event (aside from reading as many stories, in general, as possible)?

Correct, there will be no reading list available ahead of time - anything that's been published on the forums is fair game. Ideally, the games will be between four-person teams, which should allow for decent coverage across the full team of all the stories that are likely to be a part of the event. Quizbowl questions are typically written such that anyone who has even a broad familiarity with the subject of the question should be able to guess it once all the clues have been read, so although having detailed knowledge of some stories will give teams an edge, having to actually fully read most of the stories on the forum shouldn't be required to stay competitive.

- About how many questions would you need?

I think the bare minimum to run the event would be somewhere around 30 questions, given that I'll need to exclude questions submitted by any of the players in a given game, and the group of people submitting questions will probably have high overlap with the group of people who want to play. However, one thing I'd really like to do is run a little mini two-round tournament, which would require enough questions for at least three games. To do that, I think maybe 70 questions would be enough, given that with a larger question pool there's more flexibility to exclude questions sent in by current participants.

- Similarly, how many guessers would you be looking for, at minimum?

The classic quizbowl format is between two teams of four players, which would require least eight players total. However, I'd be happy running a game for just two people if it came down to it. Once the event is over, I'm planning to also release all the questions in a "play at home" format which will allow people to test their knowledge individually. (Authors will be able to specify if they'd prefer to not have their questions be released publicly.)

- Can authors with multiple stories submit only one question overall? Can they submit questions for multiple stories they've written?

My current plan is to allow up to two questions from each author, although if we end up with a deficit of questions, the limit might need to be increased.

Also can we submit questions for tales not our own? Wildboots 'crow and a few other have rich detail and lore centric stories and it might be fun to offer questions on those tales as well as our own...

I suppose it'd be fine to submit questions for other people's stories if you have the full approval of the author in question first. I guess the way this would be handled would be that you'd send the question to the author, and then that author would PM it to me with a note saying who the question was written by. This would probably count as using up one of that author's two questions, so as to prevent there being a large number of questions all about the same author's works.

Also since I cant discord for the forseeable future may I offer my services as a reviewer if reviews are added to the prize pool?

Sure, I'd be glad to have your reviews in the prize pool, although any possible prizes are still pretty far from being formalized at this point.
 

kintsugi

golden scars | pfp by sun
Location
the warmth of summer in the songs you write
Pronouns
she/her
Partners
  1. silvally-grass
  2. lapras
  3. golurk
  4. booper-kintsugi
  5. meloetta-kint-muse
  6. meloetta-kint-dancer
  7. murkrow
  8. yveltal
holy shit this is the true mashup that we’ve all been waiting for.

Eons ago, I’ve written a few packets/for a few tourneys and ran/circulated a Pokémon trash tournament that had decent traction in a few circles … I know this wasn’t specifically on your setup, but if you’d like to remove the crowdsourcing element so that question writers aren’t players/packet uniformity vs community involvement, hmu! I’m down to be the sacrificial writing lamb again; this is such a specific and wonderful nostalgia. Otherwise I’m down to get slaughtered actually playing the thing.

Is this just toss-ups, /no power? (Sidebar about bonuses: I think a general bonus format of [author]/[lesser known work]/[lesser known character] would work reasonably well, but compounds your crowd-sourcing issue a bit. Makes sense to cut for now).

Logistics—unsure if this was already on the table, but I’d recommend allowing players to both buzz and answer in text chat, for the folks who aren’t mic setup/averse to being on mic.

Looking forward to the semantics debates in which we get to explain the classic pitfalls of book title buzzes lmao
 
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The Walrein

Vicinal Dragging for the Truth
Partners
  1. gulpin
  2. kricketot
  3. bulbasaur
Eons ago, I’ve written a few packets/for a few tourneys and ran/circulated a Pokémon trash tournament that had decent traction in a few circles … I know this wasn’t specifically on your setup, but if you’d like to remove the crowdsourcing element so that question writers aren’t players/packet uniformity vs community involvement, hmu! I’m down to be the sacrificial writing lamb again; this is such a specific and wonderful nostalgia.

I am aiming more for community involvement than having standardized questions, so I'm going to attempt the crowdsourcing plan first, but if it doesn't end up being viable, I'd be happy to have your skills as a packet writer! Note that I'm planning on working with authors to help edit their submitted questions into something semi-regular, so hopefully the questions won't get too wild.

Is this just toss-ups, /no power? (Sidebar about bonuses: I think a general bonus format of [author]/[lesser known work]/[lesser known character] would work reasonably well, but compounds your crowd-sourcing issue a bit. Makes sense to cut for now).

Yup, just toss-ups and no powers, in the interests of keeping things as simple as possible for the first run of the event and minimizing load on crowdsourced question writers. If we did have bonuses in a future event, my initial thought would be for them to just be various trivia questions about the story in the toss-up, also submitted by the author, but it's something I haven't planned in much detail yet.

Logistics—unsure if this was already on the table, but I’d recommend allowing players to both buzz and answer in text chat, for the folks who aren’t mic setup/averse to being on mic.

I honestly hadn't thought of this yet, but this definitely seems like a good idea! Edited the first post to add this.
 

Negrek

Play the Rain
Staff
This sounds like it's shaping up well to me! Only one note about your answers to my questions earlier:

I think the bare minimum to run the event would be somewhere around 30 questions, given that I'll need to exclude questions submitted by any of the players in a given game, and the group of people submitting questions will probably have high overlap with the group of people who want to play. However, one thing I'd really like to do is run a little mini two-round tournament, which would require enough questions for at least three games. To do that, I think maybe 70 questions would be enough, given that with a larger question pool there's more flexibility to exclude questions sent in by current participants.
I think thirty questions is going to be no problem. However, Review Blitz generally has the highest participation out of any forum event, and that had 41 people... if each of them submitted two questions for you, that'd be 82 total. With Review Blitz at 41 people, I think hoping for 35+ to submit questions for this event is probably unlikely. But it sounds like that's more of a "want" than a "need," and you can have non-authors write some, so you should be okay. Just don't want you to get your heart set on that number of submissions, heh.
 

WildBoots

Don’t underestimate seeds.
Pronouns
She/Her
Partners
  1. moka-mark
  2. solrock
Tentatively interested.
 
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