2021 Penn Bowl: Playtest Discussion

[Justice William Brennan]

This thread is for offering feedback on questions from the playtest.

First, I'd like to thank the editors for all of their hard work up to this point. The editors and their categories are listed below:

American Literature: Taylor Harvey
British Literature: Margaret Tebbe
European Literature: Margaret Tebbe
World Literature: Jordan Brownstein

American History: Emmett Laurie
European History: Tracy Mirkin
Other History: Tracy Mirkin
World History: Emmett Laurie

Physics: Jonathen Settle
Chemistry: Paul Lee/Sam Botterbusch
Biology: Shan Kothari
Other Science: Shan Kothari

Auditory Arts: Michael Yue
Visual Arts: Aseem Keyal
3/3 Film: Taylor Harvey

Belief (Religion & Myth): NourEddine Hijazi
Philosophy: Jordan Brownstein
Social Science: Harris Bunker edited until mid-August, Jordan will finish the remainder of the category and revise the existing questions

Miscellaneous: Nitin Rao

General comments on the set are welcome, but specific comments on clues, answer lines, and inter-/cross-category difficulty will be most helpful!

Even if you've already given feedback in the playtest server or the feedback form, I encourage you to post feedback here so that future players can see what has already been said.

[Cheynem]

This was a very good tournament. I especially enjoyed the religion and film questions.

A few points:

-I probably sound like an old cranky white guy, but the U.S. history seemed to contain almost no political history. I appreciate the attempts at asking about underrepresented topics or groups, yet this seemed very skewed to the social history of the U.S. I also would note that acting like "Back to Africa" as theorized by Marcus Garvey and the colonization of the ACS were very different, if similar in the end result. I don't think the question is inherently wrong, but I was surprised to see what the actual answerline was due to all the American Colonization Society clues.

-The literature in this set was solid (the answerlines were excellent), with some recurring issues. Frequently, literature bonus parts would have very hard, almost too hard hard parts (I guess this was true of most of the bonuses). The tossups tended to have very hard early clues that mildly cliffed. For example, The Seagull tossup requires you to know a couple of lines from the play in the lead-in clues before going to the famous play-within-a-play plot point. You can see by buzzpoints, as well, that everyone basically buzzed at the same place even though there were numerous superb literature players competing.

[Votre Kickstarter Est Nul]

-I probably sound like an old cranky white guy, but the U.S. history seemed to contain almost no political history. I appreciate the attempts at asking about underrepresented topics or groups, yet this seemed very skewed to the social history of the U.S.

I think thats completely fair. In the home stretch of the set I felt a little stuck for ideas, and general interests and what I was reading at the time pointed me in directions away from political history. It was definitely stupidity rather than any attempt to write on or ignore certain subjects. For what it's worth, I think all 3 of the packets 11-13 TUs are political, though two are getting cut and replaced by other political history. After that, I'll be sure to reshuffle things so they aren't crammed in the mostly unplayed packets.

I also would note that acting like "Back to Africa" as theorized by Marcus Garvey and the colonization of the ACS were very different, if similar in the end result. I don't think the question is inherently wrong, but I was surprised to see what the actual answerline was due to all the American Colonization Society clues.

My idea here was more to ask in a sense of "theories that espoused this general idea/practice" and less to make them sound like a continuous ideological position; apologies if it came off muddled, I'll definitely work with it. Thanks for the notes!

[AGoodMan]

I missed this during the initial look-through of questions, but I think the original sin TU mentions near FTP that baptism gets rids of original sin. This is to my knowledge primarily a Catholic doctrine not universally shared by other streams of Christianity. I would suggest 1) caveating the clue appropriately and 2) possibly moving it up, because as a non-Catholic I'm not sure I would confidently buzz with the right answer if I heard that clue in vacuum.

Additionally, I mentioned this in the Discord (and with some agreement from Will Alston), but I think it is worth mentioning again that the Greco-Roman myth turned out to be quite tough in this set, at least in the two tossups I remember (Eris and Cyprus). I would suggest toning down difficulty by replacing perhaps the Cyprus tossup with something more standard.

[Limonana]

I missed this during the initial look-through of questions, but I think the original sin TU mentions near FTP that baptism gets rids of original sin. This is to my knowledge primarily a Catholic doctrine not universally shared by other streams of Christianity. I would suggest 1) caveating the clue appropriately and 2) possibly moving it up, because as a non-Catholic I'm not sure I would confidently buzz with the right answer if I heard that clue in vacuum.

Additionally, I mentioned this in the Discord (and with some agreement from Will Alston), but I think it is worth mentioning again that the Greco-Roman myth turned out to be quite tough in this set, at least in the two tossups I remember (Eris and Cyprus). I would suggest toning down difficulty by replacing perhaps the Cyprus tossup with something more standard.

I'll mention this specific doctrine being Catholic in origin, but I'm comfortable with its current placement in the tossup. This is an incredibly noteworthy result of baptism in Catholicism.

I predicted Cyprus would be too difficult and I wrote a replacement tossup for it. As for Eris, it's a tad difficult, but I'm comfortable with it being the (now) most difficult Greco-Roman myth tossup. In general, I took a couple of swings in Greco-Roman myth that will be toned down; I was curious to see how they would playtest before replacing/editing them.