Unguessable questions to ask when there are no signs or plaques

[+mustakorppi]

What kind of questions have you found that work when a location doesn’t have anything written, now that hiding a code yourself is not allowed?

 

”Count x” or ”what color is x” type of questions seem like they’d be trivial to guess without ever visiting the location.  Not like you could ask adventurers to count to any large number or require the correct pantone color or anything.

[+dprovan]

First of all, let me observe that "trivial to guess" isn't inherently evil. I can't see the question until I'm at the location, right? If I have to guess, it's not because I'm cheating. I'm standing right there! I'm guessing because something has changed at the location or the question is ambiguous or otherwise hard to understand. So to the extent you make the question hard to guess, make sure you're not making impossible to answer whether guessing or not.

 

I have run into both "count x" and "what color is x" questions. (I'm not sure I've seen them in ALs, but I have seen them in whereigos which I will claim are sufficiently similar for the purposes of this discussion.) It is true that sometimes they're easy to guess. For example, 2, 3, or 4 are the likely counts. But I've also seen questions like that that are not trivial. One I remember where even though I had every reason to think the answer would be no more than 4, when I got on scene, I discovered the actual answer was 46, so I never would have gotten in by guessing. Once I was asked for a color, and it was white, a "color" many people wouldn't consider guessing because, well, it's not really a color, is it?

 

Beyond that, I'm not sure I can offer any suggestions without knowing the adventure. You took people to that specific place for some specific reason, right? What is it you wanted them to see? Ask a question about that. If you can't ask a question they couldn't have guessed without seeing it, then why bother to show it to them?

 

I'm not saying this to rule out a stop that doesn't have some arbitrarily high standard, I'm just saying it to focus the problem on how this location fits into the adventure. There's nothing wrong (as far as I know) with a location where there's nothing special to see, but if the location is that arbitrary, perhaps it could be arbitrarily placed where there's, say, a telephone pole with a number on it or a tree that has numbered tag nailed to it. And, if so, how does looking at that number fit into the adventure?

[+mustakorppi]

If you read the help the HQ has made available, the questions are meant to force the player to prove they were there. If the answer is trivial to guess or look up online, it doesn’t accomplish that.

 

Now, as that isn’t in the actual guidelines I don’t personally really care that much unless forced to. But I run into the same issue if I make finding the answer require doing something at the location that would tempt people to find an easy way out. It’d be as if I made a T5 tree climb cache and people were able to log it from the ground with trivial effort.

[+barefootjeff]

4 hours ago, dprovan said:

First of all, let me observe that "trivial to guess" isn't inherently evil. I can't see the question until I'm at the location, right? If I have to guess, it's not because I'm cheating. I'm standing right there! I'm guessing because something has changed at the location or the question is ambiguous or otherwise hard to understand. So to the extent you make the question hard to guess, make sure you're not making impossible to answer whether guessing or not.

 

At the core of the problem is that the geofencing is too easily defeated with location-spoofing apps and the AL app allows unlimited guesses, so any "count this" question runs a significant risk of being armchair-logged.

 

4 hours ago, dprovan said:

There's nothing wrong (as far as I know) with a location where there's nothing special to see, but if the location is that arbitrary, perhaps it could be arbitrarily placed where there's, say, a telephone pole with a number on it or a tree that has numbered tag nailed to it. And, if so, how does looking at that number fit into the adventure?

 

I've just received my first credit and was out yesterday investigating the area where I hope to place the AL. It's a hike through a national park leading down to the site of a shipwreck, but there are very few signposts and no telephone poles. For three of the locations at points of interest, there's something I can use for the question that will fit the bill nicely, but the other two are more difficult. There are two signposts I can use to create reasonably unguessable questions but they're at trackheads rather than something along the track that's worth drawing the adventurer's attention to. All that's there are trees and rocks so going beyond counting or colours without getting into technical botanical or geological names is tricky.

[+JohnCNA]

2 hours ago, barefootjeff said:

For three of the locations at points of interest, there's something I can use for the question that will fit the bill nicely, but the other two are more difficult. There are two signposts I can use to create reasonably unguessable questions but they're at trackheads rather than something along the track that's worth drawing the adventurer's attention to. All that's there are trees and rocks so going beyond counting or colours without getting into technical botanical or geological names is tricky.

You aren't required to use all 5 locations if there are not 5 useful or 5 interesting things to use for clues.  There's nothing wrong with a 3 or 4 location Adventure Lab.

[+barefootjeff]

3 hours ago, JohnCNA said:

You aren't required to use all 5 locations if there are not 5 useful or 5 interesting things to use for clues.  There's nothing wrong with a 3 or 4 location Adventure Lab.

 

The thing is, there are five places of interest along the loop track, it's just that a couple of them don't have any signs or much else for framing unguessable answers.

 

Looking at the ALs both to the north around Newcastle and south in Sydney, they all have at least 5 locations (one has 6, two have 8 and one has 10) and most have bonus caches too, so I suspect some in the community would feel short-changed if I created one with only 3 locations.

 

Perhaps something that could be done to address this is to limit the number of guesses within a reasonable time interval, say two or three in each ten or fifteen minute period. The way it is at the moment, anything numeric that's less than a hundred can be guessed by trial and error in just a few minutes.

[+mustakorppi]

4 hours ago, JohnCNA said:

You aren't required to use all 5 locations if there are not 5 useful or 5 interesting things to use for clues.

A sign/plaque is usually not an interesting thing. A sign can sometimes be found next to an interesting thing, but the fact that adventure labs force the players’ attention to the sign instead of the interesting thing itself is a design flaw.

[+baer2006]

21 hours ago, barefootjeff said:

so I suspect some in the community would feel short-changed if I created one with only 3 locations.

So? I didn't know that "the community" was entitled to get only ALCs with at least 5 locations.

Anyway, if 2 of your 5 locations don't support "unguessable" questions, ask a guessable one. Anyone, who wants to complete the Adventure, still has to walk the full round.

[+barefootjeff]

43 minutes ago, baer2006 said:

So? I didn't know that "the community" was entitled to get only ALCs with at least 5 locations.

Anyway, if 2 of your 5 locations don't support "unguessable" questions, ask a guessable one. Anyone, who wants to complete the Adventure, still has to walk the full round.

 

I didn't say anything about entitlement, just making the observation that some in the community might feel short-changed if there were fewer than five stages. A lot of the enjoyment in doing an AL is stopping at each location, discovering what makes it special and finding the answer to the question there. As just getting there will be a fair drive for most cachers, I'd feel I was short-changing them if I didn't provide the full experience that the credit allows me, particularly as this might well be the only AL I ever get to create.

[+mustakorppi]

So far the only suggestions have to ask players to count to an annoyingly large number, or to ask the color of a a white object because no one will guess white.

 

Does anyone have anything else to contribute to the topic of this thread?

[+dprovan]

31 minutes ago, mustakorppi said:

So far the only suggestions have to ask players to count to an annoyingly large number, or to ask the color of a a white object because no one will guess white.

 

Does anyone have anything else to contribute to the topic of this thread?

I guess you missed a couple other points, but I suppose I didn't make them explicit. One was some kind of random number in the environment. I suggested telephone pole numbers, but apparently no telephone poles, and I suggested tree tags, but I guess there aren't tree tags. Trail names or numbers, graffiti, etc.

 

The other even less explicit suggestion (because it's hard to be explicit without knowing the adventure) was a question answered via observation of whatever it is you're taking them there for. Is it to see a tree? Perhaps "in which cardinal direction does the lowest limb point?" Is it to see a view? Is there something in the view you could ask a question about? Does it sound like I'm reaching? Well, that's because I am. If there's nothing *there*, then obviously it's going to be impossible to come up with an unguessable question about there. If that's the case, you have two choices: be satisfied with a guessable question or take them somewhere else where there is something to base a unguessable question on.

[+mustakorppi]

 

On 9/11/2020 at 5:31 PM, mustakorppi said:

What kind of [unguessable] questions have you found that work when a location doesn’t have anything written, now that hiding a code yourself is not allowed?

 

[+dprovan]

I guess you're saying I'm not answering your question. I'm sorry if you think I'm not being helpful. Good luck!

[+barefootjeff]

15 hours ago, dprovan said:

I guess you missed a couple other points, but I suppose I didn't make them explicit. One was some kind of random number in the environment. I suggested telephone pole numbers, but apparently no telephone poles, and I suggested tree tags, but I guess there aren't tree tags. Trail names or numbers, graffiti, etc.

 

The other even less explicit suggestion (because it's hard to be explicit without knowing the adventure) was a question answered via observation of whatever it is you're taking them there for. Is it to see a tree? Perhaps "in which cardinal direction does the lowest limb point?" Is it to see a view? Is there something in the view you could ask a question about? Does it sound like I'm reaching? Well, that's because I am. If there's nothing *there*, then obviously it's going to be impossible to come up with an unguessable question about there. If that's the case, you have two choices: be satisfied with a guessable question or take them somewhere else where there is something to base a unguessable question on.

 

For my one, no tags on trees and surprisingly very little graffiti, not that I'd want to use that in a national park anyway. Trail names are shown on maps so aren't unguessable either.

 

For compass directions, unless you're requiring someone to bring an actual compass you could only really expect people to identify eight of them (N, NE, E, SE, S, SW, etc.), so anyone would have the right answer after at most eight guesses. The same with colours, you could really only expect people to come up with the three primaries, three secondaries plus black, grey and white. Requiring someone to identify a colour as "lilac" or "turquoise" would be a stretch too far, I think, even purple and violet are essentially interchangeable.

 

There's a multi where one of the waypoint questions is to name a prominent mountain visible in the distance from that location, with the required numeral being the number of letters in the name. The two problems with that are that visitors to the area aren't familiar with the mountain or its unusual name, and, well, spelling really isn't one of the CO's strong points and his letter count was different to everyone else's.

 

For my own AL, at the three waypoints where there's a plaque or a sign I've used something on those but for the other two I've resorted to counting something on the feature of interest. Maybe those two locations will get heaps of armchair logs, but would I or anyone else even find out? As far as I can see, finds on individual locations aren't displayed anywhere. Does partial completion of an AL still give a +1 to the find count for the locations answered?

[+Max and 99]

9 minutes ago, barefootjeff said:

As far as I can see, finds on individual locations aren't displayed anywhere

Only on the leaderboard for the first 10 to complete it. 

9 minutes ago, barefootjeff said:

Does partial completion of an AL still give a +1 to the find count for the locations answered?

I believe it does. I've never checked my find count in the middle of doing an adventure lab, but I'm fairly confident it does. 

 

[+Lynx Humble]

48 minutes ago, Max and 99 said:

Only on the leaderboard for the first 10 to complete it.

 

For an invidual location it's only the first 3 that are shown. In the stats you also have the number of people that completed that invidual stage.

 

48 minutes ago, Max and 99 said:

I believe it does. I've never checked my find count in the middle of doing an adventure lab, but I'm fairly confident it does. 

 

It does

[+Max and 99]

5 minutes ago, Lynx Humble said:

For an invidual location it's only the first 3 that are shown

Thanks for the correction.

[+barefootjeff]

4 hours ago, Lynx Humble said:

For an invidual location it's only the first 3 that are shown. In the stats you also have the number of people that completed that invidual stage.

 

Thanks, it'll be interesting then to watch the numbers on each stage of my one when it goes live to see if the two numeric-answer ones get more hits than the other three.

[+Max and 99]

4 hours ago, Lynx Humble said:

In the stats you also have the number of people that completed that invidual stage.

Where are these located? 

[+mustakorppi]

One thing I’ve considered is listing required equipment right at the start. For example, a tape measure (or a mm scale ruler) is cheap, easy to use and provides enough range to make guessing more annoying than just doing it properly (for people already at the location at least).
 

A hanging hook scale (e.g. for weighing fish or luggage) could work in some situations with instructions to round the result, but the risk of people trying to do it right but still getting a different result than I might be too high. 

 

 

[+elyob]

Today I encountered the perfect armchair adventure lab.  It is intended that you guess at the answer and the three choices are provided for that answer.  The answers have nothing to do with the location.  The answers are simply part of some storytelling.  

 

There was too much distance to visit all five locations today.  At the three questions I encountered, I had to try all three choices before getting the desired answer.  I guess I really failed to follow the story narrative.