[Jazuela]

People who have played MOOs might be familiar with using @ symbol; people who have been "builders" for MOOs definitely would be familiar with it.

help, with no symbol, is the "typical" method of accessing help menus in muds, as a player. In some games, gmhelp or @help would give access to staff-only help files, and on occasion, a mud would even have it set up so that @help opens up a help-file creation process for staff members who need to add new help files to the list.

But from the player perspective, you'd think - well this guy is already at a disadvantage, since he's looking for help in the first place. Why make it more complex than it needs to be? Just make help be the syntax to access help files.


So you might see the player type:
help
and he would get this:

What would you like help on? You can type >help subject or help complex_subject. You can also find help files categorized as follows:

combat movement communication skills crafting
wholist credits gameworld flora_fauna

and the player might already know he's trying to find out how to kill something and he'd type
help kill

or maybe he is trying to find out the syntax, because kill isn't working, so he'd type
help combat

which would give him a list of various combat help files, including attack.

and then he'd type
help attack
and see the actual file, including the syntax and how it's used, with cross-references to related help files.

At any point during this, he could just type
help attack
and get the attack file.

But if he's not sure what the file is called, then he has the opportunity to check different categories which are provided to him by typing help with no for-or-aft arguments.