Combat is one of the basic activities of mudding, though not
the only one. First, some monsters will attack you, and you will
want to defend yourself. Second, if you kill a monster, you can
take any items or treasure it has.  Third, fighting (and
killing) monsters gains you experience points, which will help
you to survive in the future.

   When you first start out here, you will be weak and frail,
until you start to improve your skills.  Your chances of
defeating an opponent (player-character or non-player-character)
depend on a couple of things: your skills, and your
weapon/armour. 

   You will want, before entering combat, to type 'wield
', and 'wear ', if you can find, buy, or beg
some armors or weapons to use. This is very important, because
if you do not have armor or weapons to use, you will not hit the
opponent with anything but your fists (if you have skill in
that) and you will not be protected from their hits on you.

   You can attack a monster by typing "kill ". You may
also find monsters attacking you, or sometimes a monster will
attack you if you cast a spell at them, or if you have attacked
them in the past.

   Here is a short example of a battle with an orc as your
opponent:
  
      You are wielding a dagger, and he is wielding a knife.
  
      Orc swipes at you with his knife, and delivers a glancing
blow.  You swing at orc with your dagger and do light damage.
Orc heaves his knife at you with all his might and hits you,
hard.  You muster all your strength and deliver a terrible blow
to orc's head with your dagger. Orc dies.

   After the battle has ended, it's worth examining the corpse
immediately, as the orc may have owned something of value.

   To this end, you can use the autoloot command [HELP
AUTOLOOT], to grab all that your vanquished had!
   
See also:  KILL, WIELD, WEAR, SKILLS, SPELLS, BATTLE, MELEE
COMBAT, RANGED COMBAT