There are a great many configuration options for you to choose from. The communication options must be set right or the terminal will not work at all. Other options may be set wrong, but will cause no problem since the features they set may not be used. For example, if you don't have a printer connected to the terminal it makes no difference how the printer configuration parameters are set inside the terminal. Then nothing will display on the screen and your terminal will be dead.
Some terminals have a configuration option to inform the terminal that no printer is attached.
However, this doesn't help much since there are many other erroneous commands that can be sent to your terminal that will really foul things up. This is likely to happen if you send the terminal a binary file by accident. In some cases a wrong setting will not cause any problem until you happen to run a rare application program that expects the terminal to be set a certain way. Other options govern only the appearance of the display and the terminal will work fine if they are set wrong but may not be as pleasant to look at. Some options concern only the terminal and do not need to be set at the computer.