A Rule Proposal

[Cheynem]

This stemmed out of that "reverse prompt" discussion a while back.

I think that answer lines, for common link type questions, should be required to accept (not even prompt) more specific answers if they are asking for a general type of answer (ESPECIALLY if they reference that specific answer in the question). For example, a question on dogs would accept any specific kind of dog, a question on swords would do the same, etc. I think that it becomes frustrating for these type of questions to have to decide if the other clues are all in the same general form or are all more specific. Yes, I know it makes more sense to start general and get prompted up, but I'd rather avoid as much gamesmanship as possible in quizbowl and reward knowledge. If you are aware this painting is about a German Shepherd, I'd take that answer, rather than negging you because you are unaware the other paintings were about other dogs.

So, to sum up, answerlines on general common link type questions I think should feature something like "accept specific types of ___, and then listing the specific examples used in the question." A challenge here is if someone says something specific but which was never referenced in the question, which I'll leave to more intelligent people to figure out.

[Skepticism and Animal Feed]

Unless the question author has provided extensive instructions in the answer line, this seems like an awful lot of work for moderators. Imagine if I'm your moderator, and this happens, and the tossup in on something I don't know like literature or physics.

Yes, this can be escalated to the TD who will then appropriately resolve the protest. But that still wastes time. Ultimately whether you change the rules or not, the decisive factor will be question authors adding better prompt instructions on tossups like these.

[grapesmoker]

I think this is something that should be left to question writers to specify, and to tournament directors to resolve. It's something that would be easy to do for a myth tossup on "dogs" or whatever, but much harder, as Bruce notes, for a category like science.