[Ide]

With the obvious caveat that the benefits of the system are tied to the type of game you're playing, one thing I don't like about restring systems (i.e., where the player asks the staff to restring an item description, or sets the description themself) is that is becomes difficult to tie the description into the world model. Unfortunately one of the benefits of a mud (over a MMO say) is that staff can respond to restring requests fairly efficiently, so I realize that by eliminating restrings you're kind of hamstringing an inherent advantage of muds over other types of MMOs.

Also you need a description system that reacts to the world model in the first place to accomplish this -- but if you go into the design of your game with the idea that you will allow restrings, then your design is going to be shaped by this assumption.

Now for something like mush-style RP, restrings are a no-brainer.

But if you're doing something, for lack of a better phrase, 'more gamey', I would go for more of a parameter-based crafting system, where the player chooses materials, effects, and so on and the system produces the description of the object. Given enough paramters you should still have a great deal of creative latitude. The added benefit is that the new object and the game world will mesh thematically (and possibly produce happy synergies that add to the theme), and the object can respond to the world model (easily getting wet, burnt, honed, burnished, responding to properties of other characters for identification, lore, etc. -- the possibilities are endless). This is not to say that in a RP environment players can't agree by contract that an object is responding to the world model, and possibly they can restring on the fly. But for a lot of these little effects I think it's more interesting to let the system handle the details.