Tuesday, July 15, 2008

A Semi-Urgent Call For Your Help

Hey, all. As many of you already know, for the past few decades, I've been Captain of the Pro team at the Pro/Fan Trivia Challenge that is held annually at the San Diego Comic-Con. I'll post my rather-busy schedule (since I'm a Special Guest this year) later this week once it's firmly settled, but in the meantime, I give to you the following plea from the Captain of the Fan team, the knowledgeable Tom Galloway, who wrote:
This year's San Diego Pro/Fan Trivia will have Len Wein, Mark Waid, Robert Skir, and an exciting mystery player yet to be named going up against Tom Galloway, Terence Chua, David Oakes, and John Sardegna, with the questions being asked by Peter David. We're still looking for questions for it, with this year's theme being "Young Heroes". Specifically, we're looking for questions about characters college-aged or below, from stories published from 1956-1986 (essentially the Silver Age and Pre-Crisis). For example, Superboy, Supergirl, the Legion of Super-Heroes, Robin, Teen Titans, Spider-Man, Human Torch, the original X-Men and Kitty Pryde, Rick Jones, etc.. For each Legion question you send, we request that you also send in at least one non-Legion question, as we don't want an excessively Legion dominated set of questions.

There are two types of questions in the match, toss-ups and bonuses. You should mark your questions with what type you think they are. Toss-ups can only be answered by individuals, while the full team can consult on the latter. The latter can thus (and should) be both harder and perhaps a bit more complex in terms of a correct answer. In general, questions requiring more than one answer ("Name seven of the villains who appeared in the story about Reed and Sue's wedding") should be bonuses, not toss-ups.

Ideally, I think 90% of toss-ups should be answered correctly, while around 50-70% of bonuses should.

Questions should not ask for issue numbers (they can be included in the question, but try for more descriptive set-ups than just "Who was the villain in Forbush-Man #3?") or creators. We're interested in story content. Also, unless it was fairly memorable, please don't write questions on the order of "In Superboy #158, Lex Luthor revealed a particular fondness for what Martian dessert?" where this was never mentioned again outside of that one panel.

For a record of 2003's match, including all questions and whether and who answered them correctly, see:

http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&selm
=bfira3%24nqt%241%40panix2.panix.com

I'll just note that ones I think were probably too easy were Tossup #10, Bonus #11, and Bonus #13. Ones I think were probably too hard were Tossups 2, 8, and 20.

Finally, if possible, try to add a bit of style to the questions, so they're not of very basic forms like "What's the Top's real name?" "Who fought Forbush-Man in Forbush-Man #1?", etc. I like Tossups 3 and 14 from the 2003 match in this regard.

Questions should be sent to hal_sdcc@yahoo.com

The match'll be Sunday the 27th, 2:30, in Room 4.
And if you understood all of that, you should probably be on the team instead of me, Still, if there's any way for any of you Gentle Readers out there to lend us a hand, 'twould be more than appreciated, 'twould be a downright blessing.

Thanks in advance for being as geeky as we are.

1 comment:

Michael said...

Don't forget to brush up on "The Collected Works of Len Wein". From what I remember, it's historically been one of your weak areas.

--Black Ink Irregular '01