That reminds me of another pet peeve of mine - muds that pair up races with classes so that elves are the best mages, dwarves are the best warriors, halflings are the best thieves, etc. This reduces your character choices, because in order to play a specific class effectively you have to pick the matching race. Worse still (particularly for a roleplaying mud), this actually ends up rewarding min-maxers.
I like the idea of giving each class its own pros and cons, but IMO they should all be equally viable for each class. Maybe a dwarf warrior is stronger, but an elven warrior might be more accurate and a halfling warrior more skilled at dodging, so that overall each race is just as effective for each class.
In a classless system you could achieve the same results by giving each race modifiers for certain skills, while being careful to balance these skills against each other so that they are all equally important. A dwarf might get a bonus to the power-attack skillset, an elf might get a bonus to the focused-attack skillset and a halfling might get a bonus to the evasion skillset - but all three skillsets would be equally good for a warrior-type character, and he'd want to max out more than one skillset.
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