Do you have any thoughts on what sort of experience you want your player to have while engaged in combat? Do you see your player carefully contemplating decisions based on reports of numbers or is he maybe reading an exciting blow by blow account of the action? Do you want the player interacting such that he controls every blow, every block or do you want the player to just decide whether to begin combat at all?

Avoiding dice rolls is entirely possible. If you really take a look at combat and boil it down to its basics, you pretty much know, as the designer, what the outcome should be. Assuming the player is making typical decisions, you'll probably want combat to last X rounds leaving the player at Y health. He will encounter Z instances of combat between points A and B that will provide him enough experience and money needed to proceed to C.

In all honesty, adding in bits of randomization only modifies this result slightly because you still actually want your player to get from A to B and all the way to the end. What you're trying to do with combat is provide an entertaining challenge between those points. Adding randomness does provide a bit of suspense, but it isn't really fun to be at the mercy of a dice roll. It can however be fun to try and work out a strategy to survive getting from A to B, especially if there are several options available to do it.

Do you want a "system" that is reusable for each encounter, or are you okay tailoring each encounter specifically?

The problem with eliminating dice rolls is you remove variability from the combat. Say in the course of your game, you'll be fighting multiple goblins. If the player learns that punching twice and kicking once kills a goblin, they will do that to every goblin they see. Dice rolls give the goblin a chance to dodge, parry, take more or less damage from punch to punch. With this kind of combat system, having static values and results to every action gets boring quickly.

One alternative is what a few people have mentioned already: tailor each encounter differently. It creates more of a puzzle solving aspect to the combat. Punching twice and kicking once killed that first goblin, but this one has a shield. What are the actions and sequence I need to use to get around that? It makes winning each battle more akin to solving a puzzle.

Another alternative (that I've only half baked just now) might be to create some variability with selecting the actions themselves. Rather than typing punch every time to punch, maybe there is some code or pattern you need to crack to figure out what to type to throw a punch. Maybe the more damaging actions (a fire spell) are behind more complicated codes. I may not be explaining this very well, but the root of the idea comes from games like Puzzle Quest. A punch will always do the same amount of damage, but the difficulty is in managing to pull it off.

There are a lot of great ways to handle combat in a text-based game. Here are some free MUDs with combat for you to experiment with..

• Godwars 2 - This game has an interesting and complicated combat system that involves a queue of commands for your limbs.
• Star Wars: Knights of Darkness - This Star Wars themed MUD uses the SWR codebase which has pretty basic combat, but with some interesting additions. The game has ranged combat with blasters which allow players to snipe at enemies in adjacent rooms, as well as space travel and space combat.
• Iron Realms - Iron Realms isn't a game, it's a company that makes a lot of good MUDs with different themes. Pick the concept that interests you most and experiment with their combat.

If you can get the The Riddle of Steel Combat Simulator from their support page http://www.driftwoodpublishing.com/support/ to work, then that gives a an overview of how text-based combat can work. It's certainly skill based but with a whole bunch of dice involved so it's random as well. Like Poker.

What kind of "dice rolls" are you trying to avoid? For example, is rock-paper-scissor ok? I choose attack A, enemy (randomly!) chooses attack B. A beats B so I win. As an extra bonus, with markov chains you cam make an AI for it if you want tougher opponents. http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/science/rock-paper-scissors.html?_r=0

I like the King of Men's talk of resource management. Let's say a swashbuckler has stamina, health, durability of his sword, four hidden daggers and two pistol shots. Stamina regenerates quickly, health slowly, sword not at all until you find a new one. Health loss in swordfights is inversely proportional to the amount of stamina expended. Throwing a dagger gives you the opportunity to run away. Pistol shots are instakill but rare obviously.