In my mud, when someone initiates combat against another a 2d battlefield is displayed. Usually the combatants start off on opposite ends of the map, but if a thief-type character backstabbed the opponent to initiate the fight, this would be reflected appropriately on the field as well. Ranged combat works as you would expect: Unlike melee or close-range attacks, it can do damage from further than one location unit away.
If you want, you can manipulate the size of the generated battlefield so that large rooms really are "large". Just by simplistically storing length and width you are able to create long hallways, small rooms, and larger caverns.
You don't. I would highly recommend a system that generates a coordinate-based battlefield in a rooms-based mud over allowing certain weapons to traverse rooms which might not be described in a contiguous fashion. Since you wouldn't want bow-users to pick off everybody with no consequences, you need to let mobs retaliate in some fashion. But you also don't want them to leave their room to exact retaliation, because then a melee fighter could just equip a bow in order to pick off the mobs in a room one-by-one. And then, you can't just have the entire room up and move when they're being bombarded, because oftentimes mobs will be stationary, such as a king in his throne-room.
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