Consider (MUD)

Consider is, in MUDs (particularly DikuMUDs and EverQuest), a player character capability, usually implemented as a command, for evaluating the likely outcome of engaging in combat with a potential enemy. It is often abbreviated con.

While the ability to estimate the difficulty of combat is valued by players, particularly newbies, this capability has its downside in that implementations of it are often bug-ridden, and the more complex a MUD's combat system and the capabilities of an individual opponent, the less likely it is that a consider will give an accurate result. Some MUDs have implemented consider commands only to disable them because the results were sufficiently misleading as to be worse than having no such capability at all.

In text-based games, the results of a consider are most often expressed as a verbal result such as "Fairly easy", "You would need a lot of luck", or "You ARE mad". In graphical games, a common convention is for results to be color-coded, typically with green or blue indicating a weaker target, white or yellow signifying a close match, red or orange meaning a stronger target, and purple or special-case graphics such as a skull indicating that one is completely outclassed.