Cradle Plain: World Building and the Implied Setting

DM's love their campaign worlds. Well, you pretty much have to, else there's no real point in having one. It's been a long time since I've ever had the need or opportunity to create a campaign, but with a healthy, weekly game on the go, I finally had a good reason to build one. So I did: Cradle Plain.

If you don't mind, I'd like to occasionally bang on about it, starting today.

4th Edition D&D has what the developers call an 'implied' setting, a selection of people, places, and histories which are assumed to underly most games running in the 4E rules. The Gods fought the Primordials, Orcus is the Demon Prince of Undead, the Feywild and the Shadowfell exist alongside and are coterminous with the Mortal World... and so-on. Thematically, the rules also talk about a presumed 'Points of Light' (PoL) setting, a world where small pockets of civilization are continually at threat from the shadows of the larger World. All pretty good stuff, rich pickings for the game, and well-presented both in the core and subsequent expansions.

Many DM's won't care about the implied setting and will completely ignore it, forging new worlds with their own geography, Gods, origin stories, cosmology and all of that stuff. Others might not have the inclination or the time to engage in such world-building antics, and instead accept the implied setting for what it is, using the Nentyr Veil straight out of the pages of the DMG, and running published adventures almost verbatim. Most though, including your humble host, fall somewhere in between, so what does the implied setting mean to them... or more to the point, what does it mean to me?

When it came to building Cradle Plain, I didn't have the time to design and write everything from scratch, much as I'd have liked to, so I already knew I'd have to pull a lot of stuff from the various adventures and supplements published by Wizards. I also knew that a weekly game, which was something I hadn't had the luxury of for a long, long time, would afford me the delicious opportunity to forge a campaign with multiple stories and long-running characters which could grow directly from the actions of the PC's. We play four hours a week, which means, technically speaking, I only have to actually prepare four hours ahead of time; in practice, I prepare far in advance of that, but the further out I go, the more purposefully vague I force myself to get, in order to accomodate several PC's whose actions I couldn't possibly predict that far ahead of time. Although I would never go so far as to describe myself as a sandbox DM (I love my metaplots way too much for that), I did want them to feel invested in the world and to feel that they were driving the action.

So there I was, with the opportunity to build a dynamic campaign, but with the necessity to use pre-published material... books which would have the implied setting fully present and correct. I panicked briefly, then set to work.

I liked the Points of Light theme for conjuring a feel which wasn't at odds with my D&D experience; you could still have fantastic cities with mile-high towers, aloof mages and power-hungry Kings (the points of light, i.e. your cake) alongside the unforgiving, dangerous wilderness and the cold terror of the dungeon (the darkness in between, i.e. eating of said cake). So straight off I saw no reason not to import PoL lock-stock-and-barrel into the campaign.

Next, geography. I wanted a world a couple thousand miles across, a few weeks of hard travel end-to-end. This would give me enough space to brush in the Points of Light theme without being so big that the PC's were effectively locked into a small corner until the inevitable introduction of Paragon-level teleportation and overland flight rituals. I wanted them to be able spread their wings, travelling the land using good old shoe-leather first, so that when more convenient magic finally came along, they could appreciate it all the more. So this means we're in an isolated tract of fertile plain whose edge touches the sea, or as the campaign wiki puts it:

Shielded by the thick Midron Mountains to the north, sheltered by the branches of the massive Arubisath forests to the west, and harboured by the turbulent seas of the Greyland Wash to the south and east, Cradle Plain has existed as a somewhat independent confederation of lands and peoples, distinct from the massive turmoil which has repeatedly overtaken more distant regions of the world, or Outside, as it is known to the locals.

The campaign is enclosed, which in practical terms gives me some necessary control over where the characters are able to roam, but equally importantly, reinforces a feeling of isolation from the rest of the World. It has a good variety of terrain, magic coming to the rescue where semi-realistic climate patterns do not, several large ports of call for the adventurers to enjoy the feel of the area and pick up quests, and, I hope, enough intrigue to tantalise them into travelling far and wide without necessarily waiting for me to prod them in the right direction.

I knew I wanted to build the campaign around an earlier idea revolving around Citadels of power which were believed to mark the final resting places of celestial beings. This synergised immediately with the war between the Gods and the Primordials, and although that isn't spelled out in the common histories, it is assumed by Plain scholars that the Citadels are some kind of relic of that conflict. In any case, the imprecise history of the Citadels, what they are and what they're for, is one of the central themes of the campaign. The Primordials themselves are curiously absent from the accepted histories, consigned to a time known as 'Beyond Reckoning'. It's safe to say that, as a force even gods have to be fearful of, they, er, might well pop up in the future, but it was still a fortuitous and satisfyingly good fit for an idea that had been floating around in my head for the better part of a decade.

Pantheon-wise, for a long time now I have tired of building gods and portfolios, and normally don't apply much thought to this at all. I had also grown tired of the 3E divine healing paradigm and the classes that were intended to do it. In fact, the original 3E Cradle Plain idea was that there were no gods at all, with a lot of divine magic having been subsumed into the arcane portfolio, and healing magic itself transmogrified into a radically up-shifted version of alchemy or other 'technological' alternatives. I liked it at the time, but this was to be a campaign built off the launch of a new edition, and I didn't think it would have been appropriate to rip whole portions of the game out before I knew anything about how it ran. Shame really, since the new concept of Power Sources would have made it thematically quite easy, and the proliferation of non-magical healing throughout the game would also have drastically lessened the impact.

Besides all of that, Healing Surges actually make healing much less irritating these days; no longer do clerical healbots have to accompany the party and sigh as they substitute yet another utility for a Cure spell. Instead, Leader classes get to throw themselves right into the action, sometimes doing damage and healing their pals at the same time (the very idea!)... and you can get by reasonably well without a healer at all, if you need to (alright, you could do that in 3E with a curing wand of some kind, but that was crap).

So given that the ground-up change to D&D healing that I thought had become necessary in 3.5 simply wasn't required in 4E, it turned out I could relax a bit about the pantheon as well. Still, I didn't want to restrict everyone to the gods laid out in the implied setting, so the campaign wiki remained mostly quiet on the subject of which deities existed, other than that a few of them seemed to have been cast down during a time known as the Fall (and the Citadels that now stand at their final resting places carry their names: Emerandes, Phalax, Arranea). This gave my players the freedom to invent their own deities, and we could worry about who they are, and where they existed in the objective truth of the campaign universe, if, and when it became relevant. Are they aspects, or even Exarchs, of more 'famous' gods, or entirely separate entities, electing to show themselves only to a chosen few? Who knows, and it might never even matter to anyone except the PC that reveres them.

Next time: Cosmology, history, and all that good stuff.

Thoughts on: Druid Preview @ Wizards

The druid preview is a few weeks old now, but following on from my Thoughts On: Sorcerer Preview @ Wizards article, I thought I'd go back for another look.

Much like the sorcerer, the druid was an integral part of an earlier 3.5 campaign I played in, this time a long-running but now sadly defunct Forgotten Realms affair that came to a sickly halt last year after a near-TPK in the Temple of Elemental Evil. And like the sorcerer, the druid was a major force to be reckoned with in that game. Dire wolves, hippogriffs, unicorns, archons, all dropped unceremoniously on their heads while Dire Bear animal companions tore holes in entirely new and unexpected places... such was the fate of our hapless foes. Coupled with an armoury of what would now be considered a mix of Leader and Controller magic, the druid was an absolute tank of a class that regularly seemed to be able to handle encounters pretty much on its own. In fact, the general consensus around the table was that, although we felt the class was great, it had been over-cooked; the creatures on its summoning tables were too good, its spell list was too comprehensive, and it should not have been able to cast spells while wild shaping (really, was there any RAW druid out there who didn't take the Natural Spell feat?). Major kudos to my good friend Leon who repeated showed us exactly what a 3.5 druid was capable of.

Previous comments from the 4E designers hinted that they were taking the druid back to its shape-shifting roots, which I must admit I liked the sound of, but until now I've been a little uncertain how the class would fare on the levelled playing field of the new game, especially with respect to animal companions which have remained a bit of a mystery. The original classification of the druid as a potential hybrid role was also dispensed with in no uncertain terms a while back, and I couldn't have agreed more with that decision. Creating roles is pointless if you then proceed to dilute them with hybrids, which are notoriously difficult to balance in any medium.

As it turns out, there is a certain blurring of lines in the class as it stands today as well, and it seems like the druid has been a bit of a problem for the developers. How did it turn out?

Well we have a new power source for a start, Primal, where the natural world imbues its champions with ancient energy, and a new Controller as well. Although Controller is a role that desperately needs filling out after the Striker overload of the last few months, a bestial, wild-shaping, leather-and-hide-wearing druid never struck me as the type of character to manipulate things from the side-lines. I quite fancied the druid as a Primal Defender myself, but we'll with-hold judgement on that for now. Shape-shifting is in, big-style, but summoning and animal companions... well, they're simply gone. It seems the innocent dire badgers of the world have finally had enough of being launched unceremoniously into battle for some hippie dressed in bark that they've never met before.

Two thematic builds are presented, based on the Primal Aspect chosen at character creation. The Primal Guardian jams Con right to the forefront and pushes the druid towards a "secondary" Leader role, while the Primal Predator gives the druid added nimbleness (+1 speed, very nice) and pushes it towards the Striker role. This is the first indication that the druid is trying to be a hybrid without breaking the Role framework outright, and well, I can't say I like the idea all that much. Very few 1st-3rd level powers synnergise with the choice of Aspect (just four in fact), and Wild Shape, aside from the suggestion that your Aspect might determine the flavour of beasts you become, doesn't change at all.

In fact, nowhere is the 4th Edition paradigm more obvious than in Wild Shape. No rifling through the Monster Manual for you, young man; in the new game it is nothing more than an activation key for powers which have the new Beast Form keyword. This makes shape-shifting an almost entirely thematic feature; you can choose any form which you think fits your character (and your size), but other than that, the powers which you get access to are generic enough (claw, rend, etc.) that they can apply to any beast you might care to mention. The druid becomes extremely streamlined and easy to play by doing this, and roleplay-wise, Wild Shape is more of a blank canvas than it was before, but I can't help but miss the idea of a druid choosing just the right form, with just the right abilities, at just the right moment. In many ways this mirrors the reduction that 4E brought to the wizard, but for some strange reason, while I was entirely behind that change, to me the essential flavour of the druid seems harder-hit by a similar approach. Undoubtedly this is because I've always had a much greater affinity for the druid class than the wizard. From a DM's perspective, certainly, the druid is going to be much less of a headache from now on, but I can think of many players, including the aforementioned Leon, who are probably going to feel that the class has been overly-diminished in its migration to the new game.

The powers, in and of themselves, are excellent. Beast Form powers consist of a selection of relatively low-damage, very Controller-oriented melee strikes which put their victims in highly precarious positions, and the odd Psychic attack as well, which is... interesting. Utility powers would seem poised to take great advantage of Wild Shape, but as yet there's only one that actually does: Fleet Pursuit, giving the druid a Dex-based speed bonus. I hope to see more along these lines at higher levels.

In boring-old humanoid form, the Controller-side of the druid is writ large. Call of the Beast, for example, is essentially a ranged Mark, denying the victim combat advantage for an entire turn (superb for an At-Will, I can see this causing my guys a lot of trouble when I DM against a druid) and penalising him if he doesn't attack the nearest foe. Otherwise, the usual menu of slides, slows, pen-them-ins, and force-them-to-moves are all present and correct. Mastery of elements also seems to be a theme with a selection of fire, cold, and lightning-based attacks. There doesn't seem to be a power here that doesn't give the option of asserting some control over the battlefield, so if you're hankering for another Controller, you can't really go wrong.

To sum-up I'd say that the druid is difficult to get a handle on without actually seeing it in play. Ideally you'd want a player who fully embraced Wild Shape and used it to its fullest extent, and I do like the way that Beast Form powers really conjure up the image of a cold, super-intelligent, almost velociraptor-like predator... well except for the Psychic attacks which frankly seem a little out of place. What worries me though is that the druid's mish-mash of abilities seems pulled from several other, much purer and more focused classes, and that the druid's identity is a bit lost because of it. There's definitely a nagging feeling that they never really managed to take the hybrid out of the druid.

I can't help but feel that a feral avenger, who spent most of his time in beast form doing terrible and bloody damage to the flesh of his enemies, would have been a better direction to take with the class. In many ways, the recently-previewed Warden, a Primal Defender who I'll review later-on, is much more emblematic of the vestigial furies which I see driving the Primal power source... which is is a shame, because it's the druid, surely, that exemplifies Primal power in D&D, not these new interlopers (however good they may be, and the warden is very, very good).

As always, I'll update the blog with some revised thoughts once I get my grubby hands on the full class in the PHB2.

The Player Conveyer

Some changes in store for my 4E group this year. At least one of our number -- Nick, who plays aspiring dwarven librarian Mord -- is unfortunately moving away to greener pastures in March, and there is talk of one other potential exit as well. Much like any DM would, I lost all rationality at this point and immediately had visions of the whole game crumbling out from underneath me, but thankfully the remaining two players have both informed me they're not going anywhere. Which is a relief, because one of them is my wife.

However, almost the same day that this news came to light, I received a prod from another couple of local guys who are looking for a stable, long-term game and thought that ours fitted the bill. We met them on Sunday for a social vetting, discovered they both wore goatees much like mine, so no problems there, and promptly invited them to the group. While we won't be playing this week, it does give them some time to roll up a couple of characters and peruse the new edition before joining us for the first weekend in February.

This is going to make things very interesting for a few weeks as we'll have no less than six PC's. What does this mean for the game? Well, first, very little elbow room at the table, and second, a bit of work for me to re-tool some planned encounters to accomodate the new characters. There was talk of a paladin and a ranger, both of which would be great additions to the group. Why? Because not only will this be the first real chance to see both of those classes at full throttle (Corrash has dabbled in ranger already), but also because the combination of the ranger's additional damage, and the Paladin's admittedly-limited-but-still-better-than-none healing abilities, should adequately fill the hole which will be left when we remove NPC cleric Romto from the group. Ideally, I would have preferred one of the new PC's to assume a Leader role, but I'm not in the business of dictating class choices to my players, so I'll work around it if those are the classes that get them excited.

Six PC's equals my own record for the largest group I've ever DM'd, which makes the next few weeks an exciting prospect. I can't wait to see the roleplaying dynamics between the various new faces and the established company, not to mention the tactical melange that fights are going to become with potentially three Defenders. I only wish this was a long-term change rather than a transitional one. :sniff:

Thoughts on: Sorcerer Preview @ Wizards

The preview of the new Sorcerer class is up on the Wizards web site, so I thought I'd take a few minutes to post my first impressions.

Thanks to my friend Guy's character Dizloray in the 3.5E Dragonlance campaign I intermittently DM for my oldest chums, I shall always think of the sorcerer as a permanent thorn in my side. Whether it's flying around the battlefield unleashing the very best of the wizard's blasty attacks, throwing Haste spells around like confetti and NOT getting old and decrepit in the process (damn you, 3rd Edition!), or dabbling in the hopelessly broken Dragonlance Warmage Prestige Class and giving the minotaur fighter a godly AC which I can never hit, Diz is a fantastically potent and entertaining PC who attracts more than her fair share of attention from the monsters, it has to be said. In 4th Edition's brave new world of re-balanced magic-users, what can we expect from the sorcerer now?

Completely in keeping with its heritage from my own campaigns, we find it's an Arcane Striker, so thumbs up there. I wouldn't have wanted to see the sorcerer competing for too much space in the Controller's playing field. Build wise the class is given a Spell Source with which it can branch into Dragon Magic, putting Strength right into the heart of the class, or, excitingly, Wild Magic, channeling power straight from the Elemental Chaos and somewhat randomly out into the world at large.

Dragon Magic, with its augmented damage and penetrative attacks, was a predictable spin-off from the suggested flavour of sorcerers in the 3E PHB, but the assimilation of Wild Magic into the new class is a brilliant and unexpected bonus. I always loved the Wild Mage from 2nd Edition's Tome of Magic and some of that flavour seems to have been re-captured here, whether it's in die rolls to determine round-by-round bonuses, mad augmentations to critical hits and misses, or powers which can give you secondary attacks out of the blue. Sheer randomness is the name of the game, the feeling that your grasp on magic is tenuous at best, and I love it. Flavour-wise, the Chaos Sorcerer's connection to the Elemental realms just screams story-hooks as well.

Which is not to take anything away from the Dragon Sorcerer, whose reliance on Strength as a primary stat makes it an interesting choice almost from the get-go. None of the powers listed in the preview use anything except Charisma on the attack, which definitely says to me that the Dragon Sorcerer's Strength dependence is there almost entirely to open up a couple of new and unusual multi-classing combinations (well, that and to get a global bonus to spell damage... can't complain).

Power-wise we see the customary split between Ranged and Close attacks, the latter of which almost certainly favour the Dragon Sorcerer bloodied AC bonus, and a good set of options when it comes to which Defenses you want to target, so no problems there. Stand outs include: Chaos Bolt, which in offering the Chaos Sorcerer a 50/50 chance per attack of getting another attack against a new enemy, holds out the tantalising possibility of spraying damage across the entire battlefield much like a Chaotic Chain Lightning; Chromatic Orb, which does a ton of damage of a random type, as well as applying secondary effects even on a miss; and Lightning Breath, a Minor-sustainable shield of crackling energy that causes attackers to be repelled whenever they hit you (too cool).

The sorcerer's powers are hard-hitting and and chuck big damage dice around; multiple d8's and d10's are common, and Dazzling Ray, a mere 1st level Daily, does a whopping 6d6+Cha, and half on a miss. It seems to me that the sorcerer is trading Controller options for damage in a big way. I can't see anyone who plays a sorcerer complaining about that, but other Strikers might, because their damage appears at first glance to lag behind the sheer firepower of the sorcerer.

Still, it's early days, and whether or not the sorcerer's damage is excessive, I think Wizards have captured the archetype of this character class perfectly. I might just have to bring my old gnome Wild Mage, Flem the Marvel, back out of retirement...

Not So Much Forward As Back...

The Jump subsystem of the Atheltics skill came up over the weekend. It all started excitingly enough -- troglodytes dug in behind a barricade about to retreat back into their lair, dwarven Fighter frustrated at not being able to engage -- and ended up with me in a cold sweat as I flashed back to the very worst moments I've had to endure while DM'ing 3rd Edition.

Okay 'endure' is harsh. It's not like I was crossing the Antarctic. 3E did though become famous though for certain exception-based subsystems that, to put it mildly, could bring the game to a grinding halt (Grapple being the most obvious). 4E has made great strides towards eliminating these problems, so much so in fact that cracking open the rule-book at the table has become something of a rarity. Not so, the Atheltics skill. Vertical distance! Horizontal distance! Running start! Standing start!

It's all a bit painful really. Surely this could have been collapsed down into a simple 'Easy/Medium/Hard' DC, and the DM asked to make a judgement as to which category the jump fell (ha-ha) into? As it is, it arrests the game, forces rule-books open, and on top of that makes the DM decide *exactly* how high his sodding barricade is... none of which are conducive to his overall contentment rating!

Voices In My Head 2: The DM is your friend (mostly)

(Note: this is a re-post of something I originally published at the end of here.)

The DM is your buddy. He's there to facilitate your fun. The DM is not your enemy. He doesn't play to 'win' or to 'beat you down'. Or does he?

Claiming that there can be no adversarial relationship between the DM and the players is, if you ask me, nonsense. In any situation where there is a potential for failure, it is the DM's default responsibility to execute the challenge to the best of his ability. Most likely, this be a combat, but it could as easily be a skill challenge, a tricky bit of diplomatic roleplaying, or even a trap. Whatever the situation, he is doing his players a disservice if he doesn't use all of the options at his disposal... and use them well.

This means preparing the encounter, learning about the monster's abilities, and sparing a few minutes of thought for group tactics and the best use of the terrain. There isn't really any excuse for not doing that, unless the combat is improvised or has migrated into unexpected territory. 4E, even more than 3.5, requires this of the DM because monsters are so much more varied now, each one with multiple exceptional attacks, many of which synnergise both with itself and the abilities of its allies. Put together, all of this can change the nature -- and difficulty -- of a battle quite dramatically.

If the players are steam-rollering their way through encounter after encounter, they will get bored, even if some of them won't admit it. One thing, though, is guaranteed: the DM will get bored. Believe me I know. Bored, and frustrated. And more and more inclined towards unhelpful and maybe even uncharacteristically spiteful behaviour in pursuit of the simple task of getting to play an encounter to its full potential.

Nothing in D&D -- and I mean nothing -- frustrates me more as a DM than a confusion of circumstances in which monsters or villains barely get to put their abilities into action, where they become walking sacks of hit points crushed by the PC's. Sometimes this is down to luck, or simple surprise; sometimes tactics, intelligence, or team-work play an important part. These situations are okay because they're either out of your control, or the players are being rewarded for good planning. In fact they're more than okay... they're a pleasure to run and good fun to watch.

But when the monsters are being crushed simply because you didn't read the encounter, or because you didn't spot a hopelessly broken mix of monsters, or because the monsters themselves are simply not appropriate for the party... that can be disheartening. Good preparation is the only escape from this grim prison... and thankfully 4E makes it easier than ever to get that prep in.

The DM-player relationship, like any relationship, is a complicated one defined by context. The bottom line is that in D&D, rewards without challenges are dull for everyone involved. If they weren't, the game would consist of time-trials to see who could build a 30th level character fastest, instead of the complicated dance of mutual story-building and butt-kicking that the game is renowned for.

At least one of the DM's jobs is irrefutable: provide a challenge. In this battle of wits, it's 5 against 1, and he needs all the help he can get.

Voices In My Head 1: Who do you design for?

Question: who are you designing adventures for?

Your own group, whose class make-up, strengths, weaknesses, and so-on you know like the back of your hand? Or some other group..? The five-PC archetype, all roles present and correct, sir, yes sir, and a spare which could be just about anything (but which the DMG recommends being a Defender).

If you're a professional designer, the answer is obviously the second one. You can't afford to do anything other than write to the archetype because the game is designed that way. But if you're the former, the point of writing your own adventures is arguably that you can put together challenges which your own group of players are particularly suited for, or which they specifically enjoy. The problem is, it might just cause you more problems.

Fast forward two years to the point where 4E D&D is starting to groan under the weight of accumulated splat books. One of your players builds a character akin to Eagle-Eye Action Men (tm) from the 80's (you all remember those right?) He enters a room. His slanty eyes look left. His slanty eyes look right. Hidden doors, crouching monsters, meticulously laid ambushes, weapon caches, escape routes, faded glyphs, tracks, buried treasure... suddenly they're all lit up like a Christmas tree. Malcolm 'Eagle-Eye' McSplat steps back, content in the knowledge of a job well-done, and his mates surge forward. Carnage ensues. The room is laid waste (and this is 4E remember; this room is *big*). XP gushes like blood from an artery.

And so it should, right? He's crunched the numbers, bought the supplements, spotted the synnergies. He's the type of player who gets at least half of his fun when the game isn't even running, in those in-between times when he's sitting amidst a ring of open books like a summoning circle conjuring up a tricked-out demon PC from the depths of DM hell (that's like the 509th layer of the Abyss or something).

But as his DM, it's entirely within the realms of possibility that you might want to start challenging his character a bit, so you start raising Perception DC's to a level at which he could conceivably fail, a level which is off the curve for a 'normal' character of his experience, but which makes things much more interesting. In doing so, you make the adventure a bit less predictable, but you make your player a bit more grumpy, because suddenly Malcolm's tenth-decimal-place build is for naught. Suddenly he doesn't know immediately that the room is trapped, orhow to disarm it. Suddenly, maybe, the rest of the party start to matter.

Today, right now, 4E is still in nappies. Straight out of the core, and with a few sneaky little errata applied, it's very difficult for a min-maxer to exploit a sick combination of powers, feats, and skills like this. You won't find a Fighter whose AC is impenetrable even when he's trussed up like a joint of meat and nailed to a bullseye, or a Sorcerer whose Invisibility is so much Greater than everyone else's that she is effectively immune to combat... but in a year or two, you will. No game as complex as D&D can be immune to this effect, and if the rumoured changes to the GSL go ahead and the door opens to a flood of third-party releases, it will happen that much more quickly. Then the question of who you're designing for will get very real.

As a DM you want to challenge your players. You want to make them think, squirm, maybe even make them sweat a little bit. A game which doesn't challenge the players is no fun... you may as well just build a 30th level PC at the start and cut out the middle-man. But at the same time you can hardly design an adventure that effectively bypasses their strengths and zeroes straight in on their weaknesses, because they will never feel empowered by their build decisions and will just get bored with having their backsides handed to them every Saturday.

Min-maxers aren't the only 'problem' (and I don't use the term pejoratively: as far as I'm concerned, you take your fun where you can get it). You also can't ignore the eccentricities of your group. Got a party of five goat-riding halfling paladins? It sounds broken on paper (hell it sounds broken whichever way you look at it), but your group thinks it'll be fun, and heck, you think it'll be fun as well. Forget for the moment that five Defenders are going to die of old age before completing enough encounters to reach 2nd level... it's like, five halflings, man! Riding into combat on billy-goats! Hilarity will no doubt ensue, but the DM, if he harbours any expectation of the campaign moving forward at all, will have a lot of work on his hands to convert -- or write from scratch -- adventures which will challenge this group and provide reasonable opportunities for heroism and success. In other words, he has no choice but to break the system to support his players. 4E's codification of party roles makes 'sub-optimal' parties more obvious from the outset, but doesn't make them any less likely to appear. Again, that's just the nature of the game.

I guess my point, if I even have one, is that the question of who you're designing for can be difficult. As a DM I like to write adventures that play by the book, and perhaps could be picked up by another DM, someone I don't even know, and played as-is for his own group. The proliferation of networking opportunities that the internet has given us to share our work has only entrenched this position. But as a DM I also like saying 'yes' to my players, and I certainly don't like forcing players to take characters that they might not be interested in, simply because there's a hole that needs filling in the group. It's a difficult balancing act, and it pushes me towards taking pre-published adventures and bending them to fit, for the simple reason that I can't stand the idea of writing something from scratch that can't be used out-of-the-box by other DM's. It's a philosophical road-block in my head.

And I'm far too old and set in my ways to change now.