Consider is, in MUD

MUD

A MUD , pronounced , is a multiplayer real-time virtual world, with the term usually referring to text-based instances of these. MUDs combine elements of role-playing games, hack and slash, player versus player, interactive fiction, and online chat...

s (particularly DikuMUD

DikuMUD

DikuMUD is a multiplayer text-based role-playing game, which is a type of MUD. It was written in 1990 and 1991 by Sebastian Hammer, Tom Madsen, Katja Nyboe, Michael Seifert, and Hans Henrik Staerfeldt at DIKU —the department of computer science at the University of Copenhagen in Copenhagen,...

s and EverQuest

EverQuest

EverQuest, often shortened to EQ, is a 3D fantasy-themed massively multiplayer online role-playing game that was released on the 16th of March, 1999. The original design is credited to Brad McQuaid, Steve Clover, and Bill Trost...

), a player character

Player character

A player character or playable character is a character in a video game or role playing game who is controlled or controllable by a player, and is typically a protagonist of the story told in the course of the game. A player character is a persona of the player who controls it. Player characters...

 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 newbie

Newbie

Newbie or noob is a slang term for a novice or newcomer, or somebody inexperienced in any profession or activity. Contemporary use can particularly refer to a beginner or new user of computers, often concerning Internet activity, such as online gaming or Linux use...

s, this capability has its downside in that implementations of it are often bug-ridden

Software bug

A software bug is the common term used to describe an error, flaw, mistake, failure, or fault in a computer program or system that produces an incorrect or unexpected result, or causes it to behave in unintended ways. Most bugs arise from mistakes and errors made by people in either a program's...

, 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.