The
Trope Maker gaming-wise has to be
Dungeons & Dragons. The Wizard
Character Class always has the smallest Hit Die (often a 1d4), and gets one of the smallest pools of
Hit Points among classes. They also start with no armor, and have the worst attack bonus available. A Wizard wearing armor they aren't proficient with prevents them from casting spells, (and in the earlier editions, wizards could wear
no armor at all). This cuts down on mage survivability at lower levels, especially since the AC system that
D&D uses determines how hard you are to hit rather than damage. By the same token,
Linear Warriors, Quadratic Wizards is in full effect in most editions of
D&D, as the Wizard's low survivability at early levels is made up for by being a walking death machine at later levels because of how absurdly strong that spells get.
- How squishy was the early edition wizard?
- Maximum HP at first level was not in the rulebooks and was a house rule. Rules as written, the characters' hit points were rolled on a four-sided dice, resulting in an average of 2.5 hit points. The character's Constitution and Dexterity were rolled on three six-sided dice, and had to be 15 or more to improve armor class (AC) or hit points. This meant that in appx 81% of cases, the character had no bonus to hit points or AC.
- This meant the character was AC 10 (the worst allowed a player character), HP 1-4. This also meant a goblin attacking them has a better than 50% chance to hit. The goblin rolls a six-sided die for damage. This means the goblin has somewhere between a 50% and 100% chance to deal damage equal to the character's entire hit point total.
- The common rules of Death Saves or death at a certain amount of negative damage did not exist; Critical Existence Failure was the default rule! Zero hit points was dead. So the very first attack from one of the weakest monsters in the game had about a 40% chance to instantly kill a first level wizard who was rolled up rules as written.
- The assumes the character did not roll so poorly for Constitution that their hit dice wasn't a d4-X, minimum 1. Additionally, it assumes AC cannot be worse than 10.
- The Rules Cyclopedia, the definitive resource for Basic D&D, tells you straight out on page 19 where the Magic-User class is introduced about how a mage should not adventure alone and that his survivability is rather low without others to protect him. It also has Elf as a class that can use all armor but can only use up to fifth-level magic at their highest level (10th) unlike the mage who can get up to level 36 with up to ninth-level magic.
