While I obviously want to see pyramidal questions in Missouri, I think that full 5-6 line questions in the MSHSAA format would be a quick way to turn schools away from questions like this because of how long the games would become.Deesy Does It wrote:No they aren't, but I can't see any excuse not to try to emulate things like the PACE style sets VCU produces or other good high school events (5-6 lines 12 TNR).
Games already run 40-50 minutes with 2-3 line questions, 20% computation, and bonuses heavy on binary knowledge (e.g. given a work, name the author). Doubling tossup length, writing actual bonuses, and keeping in mind how slow the vast majority of MSHSAA's readers are, games will easily last over an hour, and I don't see many teams liking this change. One example of this happening was UMR's Spring tournament in 2007. Our questions were generally around 4.5 to 5.5 lines and even with experienced readers I'm pretty sure it took at least an hour a game. (Chadbourne, could you confirm this?)
Also, regarding getting longer questions into the MSHSAA state series - it's not going to happen. Shawn was forced to shorten his questions to no longer than 3 lines this year, which is about as long as you're going to get to keep games at a reasonable length.
-edit: added emphasis to first statement