I was thinking that the base could possiblty host a mystery fanfiction contest. Maybe a member who has won fanfiction contests could be asked to make a mystery fanfiction of his/her choice. The members would have to solve the mystery, of course, and in return they get a reward. I personally wouldn't care for the reward, so that could be scratched off the list, but I personally like the idea. It would be pretty useless, but just a little fun activity for members to look forward to. Your thoughts?
What it seems to me like you are suggesting, is some sort of an "Easter Crime Mystery" (which is a recurring tradition in my Country for the Easter, not so sure for the rest of the world though), where someone writes a short story (which are usually published on Milk Containers sold in the local stores across the country for the whole of the Easter), where someone gets murdered in a gathering/at a party, often at a cabin or a mansion, or where something gets stolen etc, but the murderer/thief is not revealed/caught as everyone acts surprised, but the detective in the story (who always happens to be on the crime scene) knows the answer, but no one else does. In the murderer instance, the question of who the killer is then occurs and you usually get three different alternatives (a, b and c), and you can send in the correct (or wrong for that matter) answer to a phone number, online or in some other fashion. The answer in itself is already revealed in the story that is displayed on the milk container, but it is often quite hard to spot who the murderer is, unless you look hard. When the Easter holidays are over, a new display with the "continuation" of the story is printed on to the milk containers, and here, the detective goes through all the suspects and gives us (the reader) explanations on why some of them can't be the murder, and finally, who the murderer is and why. If you guessed the right answer, you may get an award/prize (they usually draw a winner from the number of correct answers). Here's one example from my country, although in Norwegian:
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I guess something like this could be done for Christmas on NB as well, but for one thing, it should be made by the staff (or someone else picked by the staff as it takes a lot of work to come up with a real and hard mystery), and they could post the short story someplace and the members get three alternatives to choose from. Then, some time later, the right answer is revealed by a continuation of that story, and 1-3 winners may be picked by the staff from those who had the correct answer (only one answer/post per member allowed). This may be done both with and without actual awards in my opinion, but in the end, I'm not really sure if this is something that is near your initial thoughts??
What you are suggestion is not fanfiction, it's a mystery game. If you want to have a mystery fanfiction, we already have a fanfiction contest, you can just submit fanfics of the mystery genre there. No need for a separate contest specifically for that as then you need to start making contests for each individual genre, which is not going to happen. Lawliet (the host of the FF contest) can of course occasionally make a FF edition centered around one specific genre. Though that could cause a few troubles for a contest like FF where the submissions require quite a lot of preparation in most cases. That's up to Lawliet to decide.
What you are explaining is not a real FF, at least not if I understand it correctly. Someone needs to provide a basic context, however the story itself unfolds depending on how the players act, which is mainly improvisation, in their quest to solve the mystery. This can't really be called a real FF as the input of the players is very important for the development of the story. Could be an interesting idea though to organize something like that, however this would not be considered a FF contest nor even a contest for that matter and it should then be hosted by a mod as a regular member causes quite a few problems.
If you now actually mean that you simply write an entire mystery story and that people should just solve it completely at the end, well then it's pretty much a no as that 'solving' wouldn't be that spectacular. Someone could easily solve it by just posting a handful of sentences. Something like that does not need a separate contest, that should just be submitted in the regular FF contest as it's a normal FF with just a little twist.
Bold 1 - I'm pretty sure Zombie has written several FFs/OFs like this before where he writes bit of the story and the members votes on what approach the story should take next. The option with most votes gets elected and he continued the story in that fashion before giving three new options. However, I do believe the thread maker was referring to your next bold as seen below.
Bold 2 - I think he's referring to this, but I disagree as it can be done, as explained in my example above, but it would be hard to pull off, that's for sure. In my country, the ones who write the Crime Mystery for the Easter are usually famed national authors, etc.
