concepts/combat              Nanvaent Player Help

ABOUT COMBAT
     Picture this. You are standing over a huge mound of steaming corpses,
     covered in blood, the adrenaline rushing through your veins. All this
     and more could be yours, if only you knew how!

     The basic way of starting a fight is to use "kill":

     > kill <foe>

     You will now get lots of information on the screen, showing you the
     fight. While this is happening you do not have to do anything, such
     as repeatedly type in "kill", as the MUD will do this for you.

     Every 2 seconds you are shown your health and energy. For example:

     > kill wuzzie
     You swipe at the happy wuzzie with your sword, but miss.
     The happy wuzzie pokes you with his stick and hurts you.
     You slash the happy wuzzie hard with your sword.
                  %^BOLD%^Health%^RESET%^ [%^RED%^=====%^YELLOW%^=====%^GREEN%^==== %^RESET%^]   %^BOLD%^Energy%^RESET%^ {%^RED%^*****%^YELLOW%^*****%^GREEN%^*****%^RESET%^}
     The happy wuzzie pokes you with his stick and hurts you.
     You slash the happy wuzzie hard with your sword.

     There are plenty of other ways to start a fight - for example you may
     have a weapon that you can "throw" at a foe to hurt them.

     During combat, you can use the special skills of your guild. For
     example, fighters have the ability to "bash" with a shield.

     > bash wuzzie
     You raise your shield and bash the happy wuzzie.

     You can get a list of your special abilities using "commands guild".
     Then use "help" to learn more about an individual ability.

     The you should also "consider" your opponents before combat to
     determine if the little wuzzie you are about to attack is actually a
     black belt kung-fu fighter. There is nothing worse than getting killed
     after a few seconds by some big stomping monster that is much more
     powerful than you are.

     Your cuts and bruises will heal slowly over time, though there are a
     several ways of speeding up the process:
     *  Getting drunk in one of the public houses will help, and can be
        very funny to watch...
     *  Friendly clerics can heal you if you ask nicely enough.
     *  Eat lots of food.
     *  Drink certain magical potions.
     *  Stand by a forester's fire.

     The object of combat is of course is to be alive at the end of it all,
     standing over the corpse of the person you were fighting. The less
     desirable outcome is being made to have a brief chat to Death. These
     things happen and you will be bound to die sooner or later. Life is
     tough.

ADVANCED INFORMATION
     In Nanvaent you have a "heartbeat" which occurs every two seconds.
     This heartbeat is used during combat to control how your attacks
     happen. Rather than your attack being over at the roll of a die,
     combat happens in rounds, one round lasting 2 seconds, or one
     heartbeat. Every NPC (Non-player character) and every other player
     also has a heartbeat.

     During the round you generally get at least one attack and your
     opponent also has at least one attack back. One attack round is not
     usually enough to kill one opponent and some fights can last quite a
     long time. You may witness fights that last many hundreds of
     heartbeats, depending on the level, skill and constitution of both
     combatants.

     Also during each round you have the opportunity to have one special
     attack. These special attacks are guild or race dependent, and usually
     take several rounds to complete. For example, a wolf pack "bash" may
     take 2 or 3 rounds from initiation to completion. During this time you
     cannot use any other special attacks, though combat will continue as
     normal while you wait. Each attack has a different length of time from
     initiation to completion, usually the longer it takes the more
     powerful it is.

     These special attacks can be used in some cases to start a fight,
     rather than wading in with the kill immediately. Consider them as
     surprising your opponent. You will usually hurt your opponent before
     the automatic kill sequence starts, and you see the usual kill
     information as if you had just typed "kill <foe>".

     Special attacks use up your energy (guild points). Some have a one-off
     cost that you pay when you initiate them, others put a continual drain
     on your energy until it is depleted. Your guild points recharge as do
     your health points, though you may like to stand beside a fire to
     recover them quicker. You suffer no ill effects from having no guild
     points apart from not being able to use these special abilities. For
     wizards, think of guild points as spell points and the special attacks
     as casting a spell.

     In rare cases having a higher dexterity can increase the number of
     attacks you get in one round, though some guilds have more attacks
     than others do. Double wielding fighters have twice as many attacks
     generally per round than a wizard with a staff for instance, and
     knights can go into "assault" mode to do as many as 14 attacks in a
     round before collapsing from exhaustion.

     At the start of every heartbeat while in combat you are shown your
     health and energy information. This can be disabled using "monitor",
     though it isn't usually a good idea to totally turn off this bar since
     you will not know how you are doing. Also during a fight you can use
     "consider" to get an idea of the health of your opponent.

     You may notice that you cannot "quit" while in combat. This is
     intentional since you cannot use it as a way of escaping. Instead, you
     can run away from your foe, and when your bloodlust finishes you can
     leave Nanvaent.

     While Nanvaent is not a player killing MUD, you can attack other
     players in Nanvaent while following some simple limits. You cannot
     attack someone who is a newbie, nor can you fight someone who is
     either much harder or much weaker than yourself. This is called the
     level limit. Two groups of players have different limits, these being
     player killers and serial killers.

     Player killers and serial killers can be attacked anywhere in the
     game, though you are still limited by level limits when attacking a
     player killer. When attacking serial killers there are no limits, so
     be careful. The player killer or serial killer still has the standard
     limits applied to them, so a level 50 serial killer cannot attack a
     level 12 player. The level 12 player can attack the level 50 serial
     killer, but you can guess what the outcome is going to be.

     Check out the Sheriff's courtroom for a list of people with bounties,
     and who are player killers or serial killers.

     Nanvaent also has the concept of "safe ground". This is a place where
     you cannot start a fight, though if you are already in combat you can
     move onto safe ground and continue. The Nanvaent Village is one
     example of a large area of safe ground, though be warned that some
     locations within the Village may not be safe.

SEE ALSO
     consider, commands, death, joining guilds, kill, mercy, monitor, pray,
     races, restart, throw, stats, wield, wimpy