A brief review of MUD client settings

ARTICLES OF COMBAT: USING A CLIENT TO YOUR BENEFIT

"Fighting is a battle of wits and, if your wits are only as good as your settings, you will ultimately lose." - Cornelius

There are two types of people who wish to fight: those who feel settings are essential and those who see them as helpful. Those who feel they are essential will spend their time setting up all their macros, aliases and whatnot before they fight anyone; there are a few exceptions, such as if the person being fought is considerably smaller or deemed less skilled. But I'm talking about a fair, equal fight. Those who see settings as just helpful will not dally with settings. They will fight immediately and setup anything they lack as they go along. This is a crucial aspect of the fighter: combat at its most fluid is a marriage of reaction and cunning prediction. Only a human being can perform this marriage. Code cannot predict adequately the full range of imagination a human can bring to bear in combat.

Even when you have absolutely no settings, Avalon macros or anything like that, you force yourself to create them in the heat of combat. If someone double jabs you with grimleaf and bukandas, you'll most certainly setup an allheal and megillos/concentration macro, maybe even one to refill your pipe. After that fight, which you may well lose because of the lag time, next time you'll instinctively remember the macro numbers. This is another important aspect of the fighter. Those who make settings forget them. Those who make triggers will not be as aware. There is always a way around triggers. Always.

Settings are to be made during a fight, not before it. For this reason, the one setting that everyone should have, irrespective of whether they want to use highlights or substitutions or aliases or keybindings (c..f. THEORYGLOSSARY), you should have a way to set an internal Avalon macro from your last commands for both permanent and temporary uses. This way you ensure both that you know them by heart without needing to spend hours memorizing, as well as following the true spirit of Avalon combat, which is not about how good you are at coding your client, but how good you are on your toes. The coders always lose and lose badly to human ingenuity. Remember that next time you sit around setting up.

To continue, read HELP TRIGGERS.