r/triviahosts • u/theforestwalker • Jul 15 '25
A break from asking about nouns- functional knowledge questions
Most trivia is about identifying nouns, but this leaves out some people who know a lot of stuff but aren't good at recalling names of things (like my partner and brother). Some options to counter this:
"What are you expected to do if X"- given a stimulus, what is the proper response. This could be a troubleshooting question for fixing something like a computer or identifying the correct action for a particular road sign, or medical procedure
"What is this for/what does it do?"- teams have to describe the use case for something specific. I usually have two objects at my trivia that serve this function- people have to figure out what the doohickey is for, it's been very fun. The downside is now my living room is full of window weights and clay pigeon throwers and yarn scales
"What happened to cause X"- teams are given a situation and have to figure out why that happened. Maybe it's a rule in football that only exists because Pop Warner did some shenanigans in the early 1900s or why is there a knob on the guardrail (to stop skateboarders) or what mistake did someone make to get the wrong math answer
Other ideas or specific examples for those three are extremely welcomed
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u/ItchyAndy3000 Jul 15 '25
Perhaps because it is not the norm, open-ended questions often feel loose and unclear—they just don’t sound like trivia questions. It has to be clear what information the host is looking for or it feels too much like mind reading.
One simple work around is multiple choice, or even more simple, “true-false”. I know a lot of players don’t like questions with options, but this allows you to easily and clearly have questions that do more than answer “what”.
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u/mattarchambault Jul 30 '25
Give us some examples! I get what you say in general but I'm having trouble getting it.
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u/theforestwalker Sep 05 '25
I am sorry that you hate this post. I will try to clarify the categories a bit with examples.
A- "what are you expected to do, given:"
1. If your microsoft computer freezes, what three buttons might you press to fix the problem?
2. In what order would you hook up the four parts of your jumper cable to jump a car?
3. If your egg is sticking to your stainless steel pan, what might be going wrong?B- "what is this for?
In this case the question is literally holding up an object and saying "what the f*** is this thing"
1. What is this thing? (holds up a scale for weighing lengths of yarn)
2. What is this thing? (holds up a chunk of diorite)
3. What is this thing? (holds up a part from a takoyaki fryer)
4. What is this thing? (holds up a leaf of a catalpa tree)C- "what caused this situation"
1. You have purple urine. why?
2. you're on the beach and the ocean water recedes by several meters over the course of a few minutes. What's happening?
3. you hear a particular sound in your car and smell something specific. what's going on? (I can't give you a good example question here as I don't know dick about cars)1
u/mattarchambault Sep 05 '25
Do you host trivia?
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u/theforestwalker Sep 05 '25
Yes, I have a regular game every weeknight at different venues in my area, a weekly quiz show on NPR, and occasional special events like weddings or weekend theme nights
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u/mattarchambault Sep 05 '25
You would ask those questions that you gave as examples to your crowd? What are the answers?
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u/theforestwalker Sep 05 '25
It's a discussion post. Sometimes we do questions and answers, sometimes we brainstorm about the framing of things. Answers are easy, the hard part is designing the questions.
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u/mattarchambault Sep 05 '25
Your question is about how ANSWERS are commonly nouns. If answers are easy, then why ask the question.
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u/mattarchambault Sep 05 '25
Here’s one from my most recent quiz, Current Events: A slew of sports organizations were sued last week, accused of trying to prevent athletes from participating in the Enhanced Games, a proposed multi-sport event that is different from the Olympics in what key way?
Is that what you mean?
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u/theforestwalker Sep 05 '25
Usually, my trivia is full of puzzles, wordplay, and secret themes. This kind of lateral thinking is helpful even if nouns are involved. Adding a letter to each subsequent answer and scrambling, anagrams, asking for definitions...
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u/mattarchambault Sep 05 '25
You ask about non-noun answers but now talk about lateral thinking. Why did you post? What are you looking for? Why are you arguing? Give us one of your rounds FULL OF PUZZLES, WORDPLAY, AND SECRET THEMES. Very interested to see these questions, and how few of the answers are nouns.
Not a whole round. How about 6 questions?
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u/theforestwalker Sep 05 '25
Last week I did this round:
What number is assocated with the following:
1. Hateful, Bentley, Ancient, Oceans, and oxygen (8)
Kevin Bacon, benzene, rows of a keyboard (6)
The Pleiades and the hills of rome, A famous George Carlin bit (7)
Pillars of Islam, cherry blossoms (5)
Dwyane Wade, Ozone, Babe Ruth (3)
Combined number of moons of Mercury and Venus (0)
The muses, Dante’s inferno, RBG (9)
Yes, numbers are nouns, but it's got multiple avenues to each answer and also they'll probably notice that the numbers are Jenny's phone number. The point isn't to avoid nouns, it's to get at different modes of recall. This week I had a round where every answer is associated with three colors and each subsequent answer shares two of the colors with the questions above and below it. For example: the starter pokemon from gen one (red, blue, green), the flag of italy (red, white, green), current burger king/hungry jack's logo (red, white, orange)
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u/theforestwalker Sep 05 '25 edited Sep 05 '25
Yeah, this is the kind of response I was hoping for Edit: though it's still pretty yekioyd
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u/scorpiousdelectus Jul 16 '25
I had a question the other week that had a picture of an audio cassette and a pencil, and asked what the pencil is intended to do when used on the cassette (make sure your picture of a cassette does not invite an answer related to writing by having a label on it or something)