Adding movement to a text-based rpg battle

Question

Outline

I have the bones of a text-based RPG - the player can progress through a branching storyline and activate some simple events (recieivng/giving/trading items).

As I am designing the battle system (turn-based obviously) I decided it would be nice to have the player be able to "move" during battle - i.e. a heavy armour clad warrior would charge straight up to the foe but the ranger should pick his foes off from a distance and try to move to a better vantage point as the enemy approaches.

Main question

Rather than just giving the fleet of foot character a higher probability to dodge an attack (to compensate their lower defence) I wanted to give them the option to move to different points within the area of battle (jump on top of a rock, climb into that tree, etc) to make it more tactical but have become stumped.

Can anyone suggest a way to approach this (pseudo code would be nice)?

I am using C++ to write the program, if anyone wants to know.

Answer 1

You could define how these would affect the character and add flavor text. If you group them into something like biomes, you can randomly select a few at a time for each battle depending on where the battle takes place.

For example, if you has just two attributes - Offense and Defense:

"Rocky Biome" : {
    "Rock : {
        "Take cover behind rock" : {
            Defense : 10,
            Offense : -15,
            OnEnter : "%s takes cover behind a rock",
            OnLeave : "%s leaves their rocky cover"
        }

        "Climb on top of rock" : {
            Defense : -5,
            Offense : 10
        }
    }
}
"Forest Biome" : {
    "Tree" : {
        "Climb up tree" : {
            Defense : 5,
            Offense : -5
        }
        "Hide behind tree" : {
            Defense : 10,
            Offense : -10
        }
    }
}

Then you'd just display these as an extension of a "Move" option.

> Move
Where to move?
1. Take cover behind rock
2. Climb on top of rock
3. Climb up tree
4. Hide behind tree
> 3
So-and-so climbs up a tree

If you ever wanted to add graphics, you'd just attach some more information to each definition:

    "Rock : {
        Image : "BigRock.png",


        "Take cover behind rock" : {
            Defense : 10,
            Offense : -15,
            SetCharacterOffset : {-32,0}
        }

        "Climb on top of rock" : {
            Defense : -5,
            Offense : 10,
            SetCharacterOffset : {0,64}
        }
    }