Hey, not actually going to participate in this one. Just felt that I should comment on the Riddles.

Back during TTL: One, as some of you may recall, rather than dispensing Challenge Accolades I had 'Secret Bonus Challenges.' I didn't tell anybody what they were ahead of time. They were loosely associated with the theme of the Challenge, but ultimately they were somewhat arbitrary.
[hider=Bonus Challenges]In case your forgot, the Challenge for the First Labour was to write an unpleasant death scene for your favorite character.

[b]The Darwin Award:[/b] Your character commited involuntary suicide. Whoops.

[b]Double Whammy:[/b] Without reviving your character, you somehow managed to kill them twice. Impressive.

[b]Criticality Accident:[/b] Submitted a winning entry that was 12,144 characters or more in length, not counting spaces.

[b]You Have Entered the Twilight Zone:[/b] Your character hung around after they died to see how events unfolded.

[b]Art After Death:[/b] Your character's body (or parts of it) was put on display in public.

[b]TPK:[/b] Every character mentioned in your story was dead by the end of it.

[b]Death and Happenstance:[/b] Submitted a winning entry that was three paragraphs or shorter in length.

[b]The Spirit of the Challenge:[/b] Death was just a slap on the wrist for your character.

[b]Vacuum Metastability Event:[/b] You killed your character using metacontextual means. How did you even DO that?

[b]Schrodinger's Horizon:[/b] Your character is dead. Now if only anyone knew that...

[b]Accessory to Murder:[/b] A part of your character's body or one of their personal effects was taken by their slayer.

[b]An's Vengeance:[/b] Your character was killed via suffocation (death by hanging counts as their neck being broken, sorry).[/hider]

The problem with the Bonus Challenges, and the reason I discontinued them, was because ultimately they had absolutely nothing to do with how good a written entry was. Your chances of winning any of those was down to pure happenstance. It did not encourage anybody to write in a specific way and it did not reward anybody who tried to experiment or think outside the box except for those who happened to think of the same arbitrary stuff I did (and only three of those categories happened to be stumbled across).

In essence, the Secret Bonus Categories were no better than lottery tickets (in this awful analogy, each submission counted as buying one).

The Riddles are a bit better (except for [@mdk]'s, which is laughable (Hi [@mdk]!)) since at least it's somewhat cerebral and presents a challenge for people to work out. But I would argue that they are altogether less engaging than the regular bonus categories were for basically the same reason the Secret Bonus Challenges were not engaging. Case in point: Calling it now that at least one person is going to solve a riddle without even trying to.