Question about rituals and sermons

Adet

Something I always struggle with in either performing a ritual or giving a speech is timing.  Obviously, I have everything prepared in advance, ready to copy/past as necessary - but I can never get the amount of time between messages right.

I've tried reading the text aloud, but it always seems to go too quickly.  If I make a conscious effort to slow down, it feels like I'm standing there not doing anything for ages, and dragging it out unnecessarily.  Even if I go at what I think is a reasonable speed, I always look back and find that it was over in about five minutes.

Basically, I stress about it for weeks, then rush it at the time, finish too early, and the result is a disappointing anticlimax for everyone.  Any tips? 

I've tried breathing exercises and thinking of Margaret Thatcher, but Oh wait, that's my other problem.

Argys

Have a mentor or someone in your org known for rituals help you out. Ask them for tips, perform it for them in private and have them critique it. Practice, practice, practice. Ideally, you'll begin to find your flow and voice the more you do it.

Perhaps you could even act it out when you're alone. You'll look like a bloody lunatic probably, but it might help you get a feel for how much time there would be between actions and words. Finally, there's the fact that s#!% happens, whatever it may be, and you'll need to adapt to meet that obstacle.

Berenene

Yeah, before you perform it, try it out on someone else and get their input.  One thing you can do is maybe set some timers in your client to perform the next part of the ritual after a certain amount of time rather then copy/pasting it in.  Knowing that it's loaded in and ready to go might cut down on the apprehension of getting it wrong during the event, or if you need participation from others, alias the parts you need to perform  That's not to say things won't go wrong.  I did a ritual where I forgot to open my channels before hand and so I couldn't cast any of the illusions I'd written for the ritual.  But it lessons the likelihood of copying the wrong section at the wrong time.  Plus, if you have a quick script, it's easy to adjust the timers and details of the ritual for any new rituals you perform.

Silas

I just read each section out loud after I c/p it, allow a pause, then hit enter, but I'm of the school of thought that your ritual/sermon will -always- look better after the fact in a cleaned up log, so I don't stress too much about the presentation at the time.

Delphinus

• Don't rely too much on preptime. Learning heavily on a script means that you'll be at a loss when you screw up. Practice saying wise, ritual-y things on your off time, and learn to make up symbolism on the fly, and you'll know how to wing it in the event of a mistake.
• Inviting the audience to participate is good, this being a game.
• To those ends, prepping it on a client-based timer thing is probably the worst possible way of spacing it out. You aren't just vomiting a bunch of florid prose; you want them to feel engaged. When you've sent a line to Achaea, read it. How long does it take? You're probably going to comprehend it faster than they will, so give a bit more time. Then, send the next line.
• If you find a typo while doing that, don't panic. Try to brush it off. How often do you see the gods shouting corrections in follow-up? They're going to notice a mistake more if you bring attention to it.
  
• All the standard rules regarding prose apply.
  

Jonathin

I prefer to make up rituals and ceremonies on the fly. While you're typing out your next action or bit of a speech, it usually gives the right amount of a break between your actions, if a little bit long. I've found that when doing stuff like this, having an extended break is better than being premature.

Delphinus is spot on. Especially about the typos bit. I've seen so many people send a typo in an emote and then say "shrine, rather". It's very distracting, more so than the typo itself. I've learned to automatically replace typos with the correct word without noticing and pointing it out is just bad.

One other thing that may be lending to your need for immense amounts of prep time is nerves. You might be worried about how others will receive your ritual. The big thing is don't let a flop bother you. Some rituals flop. It takes practice to get the hang of the emote/illusion system nuances. 

Since I do rituals and ceremonies on the fly, if you want, find me some time in game and I can do something for you. I need to do some stuff for the *crystalline too, anyways.

Lianca

When giving a pre-prepared speech or ritual, I always post, read what I sent aloud, then count to ten at a reasonable pace. This is mostly because I work a lot with novices and want them to have time to process what I've said.

As an extra tip, try to avoid giant blocks of text. Three or four lines is probably the max you want to send at a time otherwise your audience will simply lose interest.

Iocun

Lianca said:

When giving a pre-prepared speech or ritual, I always post, read what I sent aloud, then count to ten at a reasonable pace. This is mostly because I work a lot with novices and want them to have time to process what I've said.

As an extra tip, try to avoid giant blocks of text. Three or four lines is probably the max you want to send at a time otherwise your audience will simply lose interest.

Very much agreed with both of this. Inexperienced people almost always do it too fast and use too huge blocks of text, which not only makes it very hard to take in, but gives the immediate impression of a "scripted event".

When people talk and emote naturally in the game, they don't usually type out huge paragraphs. They write a single sentence, sometimes even only a partial sentence, then hit enter.

I very much recommend never using more than a single sentence in a one emote or say, and even keeping that single sentence somewhat brief.

Vyln

Rituals and sermons are very much like performances. For every emote or chunk of paragraph I do, I usually read them in my head about three times and then move on. Relying on client wait scripts will not give a very consistent effect.

Oh, and if you want to rope in participants in your rituals, make sure they know what they're doing at which part. Might want to run through with them a couple of times.

Also, I tend to make aliases for every emote or say I do so I don't have to copy/paste all the time. Sometimes you can make mistakes in copy/pasting.

Nakari

the rule of thumb I learned was to read it to yourself twice. Certainly all the above advice is far better and comprehensive, but in my (incredibly limited) experience, it's worked well enough

(credit for it, good or bad, goes to Ty Beirdd)

Phaestus

Really good advice here all-around. I particularly like and agree with the advice about not stopping to correct your own typos. Unless the meaning is completely flubbed and no one will know what you mean, pretend it didn't happen and keep going. If it is, just repeat the line correctly and pretend the bad one wasn't there. People will be very forgiving and let a lot of things go. A couple of years ago my cat performed a stunning acrobatic leap and sauntered across my keyboard, nailing the enter key before departing while I was mid-event. One of the players who I will be eternally grateful to said in a very off-hand way, "did anyone just see a cat run through here?" We all snickered to ourselves and went about our business, no harm done.

My own personal rule on timing is to read a line to myself one and a half times before sending the next one, more if it's dramatic and you need that extended pause. You'll get a feel for it as you go. The more you can lose yourself in the moment and not stress yourself sick the better you'll be able to feel that out. I'd also recommend against auto-timing it with your client, as too many things can go wrong. Aliases are fine, but if you do use them, keep a copy of the script in another window in case you want to make changes based on what's going on around you. Being able to smoothly adapt and improvise is what sets the best roleplayers apart from people who are just good writers.

Eld

Iocun said:

When people talk and emote naturally in the game, they don't usually type out huge paragraphs. They write a single sentence, sometimes even only a partial sentence, then hit enter.

Speak for yourself, man. Not that I don't think I'd be better off not speaking in huge paragraphs, but I swear half the serious conversations I have in game probably see the other person sitting there wondering if I've randomly gone afk in the middle.

Nizaris

I personally do things scripted in order to ease my nerves, but I can definitely agree with some of what others have said. Sometimes, being too scripted means that you can't handle little things that need handling.

In regards to reading speed, the average native English speaker reads at 180 words per minute. One word is defined as 'four letters and a space'. I just generalize this to be five characters, and drop reading expectation down to 165 wpm.

Here's a little alias that you can use to help you to keep track of where even your slower readers are likely at. This is not meant to replace reading it yourself and other holistic advice given here, but rather to help you to pace yourself. The script is written for Mudlet. If you find that you want to slow it down, replace the 165 below to a lower number. Speed it up: replace it with a higher number.

Alias: 

^r (.*)$

Script:

send( matches[2] )

words = string.len(matches[2]) / 5

minutes = words / 165

seconds = minutes * 60

timer = tempTimer( seconds, [[cecho("Line likely read.\n")]] )

Example: "r emote waves his hand in greeting." will send "emote waves his hand in greeting.", and wait a decent amount of time before letting you know the line was likely read. 

Rangor

If you need to slow it down, or create a pause for "effect". Set in some emotes/tmotes/illusions or something in between parts of the ritual.

Like on Rangor I will always start off by setting a campfire, lighting it, doing some small talk with everyone present. Creates the right mood for the sentinels, and puts my head in the correct setting.

Between parts I'll stop to let people devour things by stretching a bit, getting "distracted" (rangor is very old), ask the audience where I was and talk some with the people to make sure it doesn't get too monotone. (it's boring sitting there and listening to someone talk and talk and talk and talk and talk.)

Chryenth

I count heartbeats. Read the line, eight heartbeats, next line.

Otherwise, all the advice above is excellent.

Tael

When performing sermons and things, I read the line twice. Despite playing MUDs for years and working in a job where reading is a huge amount of my time, I'm actually an excruciatingly slow reader, so that usually works.

If I want to pause for effect, I'll reread it a third time. If I want to go faster for effect, I'll only read it once or one and a half times.

As for whether rituals should be prepared and how much people should participate, it is, as with most things, not something I think you can say as absolutely as people in this thread have been saying.

It depends entirely on the context - I've seen rituals that were so neat and gripping and punchy that they really didn't need a lot of interaction to be interesting. If anything, they'd have lost a lot of their pointedness with more interaction. But if you are going to be doing something scripted, it really does need to be punchy. I'd try to keep most things to one or two lines at the most and have plenty of emotes. In short, it should be dramatic. If you're having a sort of discussion where people are participating and there's no script, you can get away with much longer messages since the interaction will help to hold interest.

One nice way to straddle the line though is to have interaction that requires very specific actions. If you tell people to kneel or approach or whatever, you can have the interact, but it'll be in a predictable enough way that you can keep to a script. Another thing I've seen work well is to have the very, very end be open-ended in some way  - there was a nice though perhaps a tad overly gruesome sermon a while back that ended with people being pointed and corpses and essentially told to mutilate them; it worked well and some people came up with very...creative...RP moments, but it didn't necessitate leaving a script because it was at the end.

Nizaris

I can agree with Tael quite a bit. When doing rituals and sermons, I'm a bit of a perfectionist, and like to go through a couple of drafts ahead of time to get the tone, grammar, spelling, etc. just right.

One thing that I personally do is to prepare the sermon ahead of time, and then store it inside of a lua table or somewhere else in the mud client, so that I don't have to copy it back and forth. Then, I just have an alias doritual #, where # is the step number to do. Then, it sends the command, and waits until it's likely read, a la the algorithm I posted above.

The way I use this, I have everything scripted ahead of time, can skip if need be, and am not too busy copying/pasting back and forth to improvise when I need to. I found copy/pasting to be extremely frustrating, and to do more to make me more nervous than I was before. Totally took the joy out of it. But, with the table solution, it's quite a bit more relaxing.

Trevize

My old setup was scripted, but manually triggered.

Lua tables for rituals with a list of actions/things to say.

SETRITUAL (name) to set the ritual.

RR - did the next ritual action in the step, echos the step (and its number) after that so I can decide if I want to personalize it.
R# to do the ritual action specifically. (for say, practice, or if I decide to 'personalize' a step I'd use it to skip steps)

Delphinus

Tael said:

One nice way to straddle the line though is to have interaction that requires very specific actions. If you tell people to kneel or approach or whatever, you can have the interact, but it'll be in a predictable enough way that you can keep to a script.

Sure, that's pretty much what I meant. Have them scream, chant, drawsalute, whatever -- as long as it keeps them from thinking, "I could've just read this in a log."

Wysteria

I practice in a cave or somewhere alone and try it out, when I emote it through, I read it myself as if I was the one watching, then I'd move on to the next step.

If you're doing illusions, make sure to definitely practice it and also have it echo back to you so you know what you sent and if it fits character limit. Make sure not to have any defences that will drop when you cast one (ie reflections will drop so it's obvious you cast an illusion and breaks the ambiance).

There's a ritual I'm thinking of doing but it's just going to be a watch and judge kinda thing. Not really interactive but sometimes having the younger ones there instead of reading it will help them learn about timing anyway. No harm done so long as it doesn't go on and on etc.

Tael

Nizaris said:

I can agree with Tael quite a bit. When doing rituals and sermons, I'm a bit of a perfectionist, and like to go through a couple of drafts ahead of time to get the tone, grammar, spelling, etc. just right.

One thing that I personally do is to prepare the sermon ahead of time, and then store it inside of a lua table or somewhere else in the mud client, so that I don't have to copy it back and forth. Then, I just have an alias doritual #, where # is the step number to do. Then, it sends the command, and waits until it's likely read, a la the algorithm I posted above.

The way I use this, I have everything scripted ahead of time, can skip if need be, and am not too busy copying/pasting back and forth to improvise when I need to. I found copy/pasting to be extremely frustrating, and to do more to make me more nervous than I was before. Totally took the joy out of it. But, with the table solution, it's quite a bit more relaxing.

I do this too, I have SERMON PREACH (iterates or you can specify line number), SERMON VIEW (whole thing or particular line number), and SERMON RESET (to first line or particular line number).

Setting that up was a really good decision. Highly recommended to anyone who does performances of any kind.

Hegua

Eld said:

Iocun said:

When people talk and emote naturally in the game, they don't usually type out huge paragraphs. They write a single sentence, sometimes even only a partial sentence, then hit enter.

Speak for yourself, man. Not that I don't think I'd be better off not speaking in huge paragraphs, but I swear half the serious conversations I have in game probably see the other person sitting there wondering if I've randomly gone afk in the middle.

Still waiting for you to come back to that Tyro exam, man.