Quoth Andy Hu: "Second, I think the question difficulty was a bit easy sometimes. An example would be one on _War and Peace_ that started out with a quote about Napoleon and saying that it had 500 characters. Having never read the book, I got the tossup just because I knew it took place in the Napoleonic era and it had a lot of characters, I don't think that question awarded more knowledgeable players who were sitting on it thinking that can't be the answer because it's too easy." I believe you were referring to my question on the subject: "It includes a long essay in which the author argues that history cannot be understood solely by the actions of great men such as Napoleon, but may be understood by observing the lives of masses of common people. Mostly, though, this novel is about over 500 different characters, most notably Andrei Bolkonsky, Natasha Rostov, Nikolai Rostov, and Pierre Bezhukov. FTP, name this Very Long Book by Tolstoy." If you'll notice, the quote does not specifically claim that the book (which is not even identified as a novel until around halfway through the question) is set in the Napoleonic era, merely that Napoleon is used as an example of the type of person whom "conventional" histories too often focus on. "Over 500 characters" may have been a bit too much of a giveaway until closer to thew end, and looking back on it, I probably would have put it after the names of the four individual characters mentioned. But the quote in question was not really a "quote about Napoleon", and players would have been given ample time before hearing that the book in question was even a novel, enough time for someone who had actually read the essay (and, presumably, the novel in which it is included) to put the clues together before the second half of the tossup. I will admit that what should have been the lead-in was a bit long for a timed tournament, though. In any event, in the room I was in, a player got it from a description of the essay's contents... and after all, it was included in the "replacement" packet, so there was a definite chance that it might not have been used. Oh well... I suppose I'll be more careful with the next packet I write. And as for the GW / Georgetown / Johns Hopkins / Maryland thing, there were a total of nine teams from these four schools present... to have all four schools in the same bracket is a bit of an oddity, but there is no way of arranging the brackets so that at least one bracket doesn't have three. And that's not counting other (I presume -- I'm not really up on the Washington-area QB scene) frequent Maryland opponents -- add Delaware, Virginia, Swarthmore, and Princeton to that list and you have (at least according to the PB home page) 17 teams, meaning that yes, there will be a lot of them in any given bracket.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.4.0: Sat 12 Feb 2022 12:30:43 AM EST EST