[KaVir]

If there's only one viable route, then clearly you've failed to offer your players any meaningful choices. But by offering many good choices, you're also increasing the number of bad ones.

To give an example, in my mud there are over 150 abilities called "talents", and every starting character has 3 of them. There are hundreds of good builds you can make by combining 3 different talents - but if you just picked 3 at random, there's a very high chance that your character would suck.

My players can only rearrange their characters while on their home plane, not when "out in the field" - so you can't just set macros like that. It's more like the second example you gave, where you meet a character one day who's purely offensive, then the next day they're purely defensive...except in this case they're both the same character, and he's redesigned since the last time you encountered him, after realising that his pure offense build didn't really work very well.

This means combat is not repetitive, because skilled players will continually tweak and adapt their characters. It's not uncommon to watch two players stress-test new builds by duelling several times in a row, becoming increasingly evenly matched with each fight as they probe for weaknesses while patching their own.

That's very much the case with my mud as well. The difference is that the experienced player doesn't need to recreate just to correct mistakes they made while learning. That same character will instead be tweaked and refined over the years, as the player's experience grows.

Otherwise you end up with a scenario like Elvarlyn described earlier, where new players have to spend time reading through forums before they create their character, or they'll end up with sub-par choices that haunt them for the rest of their character's life.

I think perhaps you misunderstood what I meant. When I say equipment is a distraction, I mean the term - the label - is just cosmetic justification for a specific type of ability. If a game designer want certain abilities that players can earn, lose and trade, then it's very convenient to describe them as "equipment".

In a futuristic mud you might do it the other way around - perhaps "equipment" refers to cybernetic implants that cannot be removed, while "skills" are pure data that can be uploaded and downloaded Matrix-style.

There is some value in breaking the abilities down to their raw mechanics: it makes it considerably easier to balance character builds that cannot use equipment with those that can.

Thus in my mud, some dragons wear barding, while others wear nothing at all - but both options are equally viable.

They all give quantifiable bonuses. To give a really simple example, there's no reason why a mud might not have a "Constitution" stat, an "Athletics" skill and a magical "amulet of health", each of which gives exactly the same bonus.

If you then say that werewolves get +1 Constitution, but cannot wear amulets, then you've just shifted the source of the bonus from one type of ability to another, without changing the character's total bonuses.

You can't rearrange your MtG deck in the middle of a game - likewise, players cannot rearrange their characters in the middle of a battle. But if they do badly, they can "go home" and redesign their character, much like a MtG player can redesign their deck, assembling it from a wide range of different options.

You don't have to throw away your MtG cards if you want to build a new deck.