Ru: Did a big reshuffle of examples into categories. I may have moved a couple of things to the wrong place; apologies if I did.
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...this has got to be the only place I've ever seen anyone claim that WOD's Mages are squishy compared to their Vampires. It's actually something of a running joke amongst the gamers I know that vampires consider themselves these all-powerful immortal beings... while sharing a world with mages who can ''summon sunlight.'' Is anyone going to be incredibly upset if I change that?

{{Earnest}}: Well, that depends. My understanding is that in the second setting (don't know much about the first) the mages are still biologically human. Compared to vamps and prommies (walking corpses who get damage downgrading and heal good) and werewolves (shapeshifters with an uber HealingFactor) they are physically frailer and weaker(1) while having awesome cosmic powers. Basically my mage friends would always say "With Prep Time, Mage. Anything else, Vamp/Were".
(1) can they get super strength?

{{Scifantasy}}: Super strength--sure, absolutely, with Life rotes.

I think that "With prep time, Mage" is a bit of a simplified way of putting it. Seeing as the Mages, being squishy humans, tend to work toward sneakiness, alertness, reaction time, and probably having a few ready-made tricks in case they get surprised...

Plus, given the trope name, the point isn't any given matchup, but how the balance changes as the characters get stronger. A new vampire or werewolf might beat a new mage, but once you get into the high echelons, reshaping reality on a whim...probably wins the day, period.

{{Ariel}}: Since SquishyWizard didn't have an entry on WOD, and since (as it was phrased) the entry on this page was about Mages being squishy, not about mundane persons being weak compared to them, I've moved it over there.
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{{Duckluck}}: Cut:
**Actually, in D&D it takes until 5th level for casters to start winning, that being when they get Fireball. /pedantry
***Actually, it does take until about 5th level, but for reasons totally unrelated to Fireball. Fireball is a ''terrible'' spell. For evidence, compare the damage from several of the extra attacks Haste grants (one per character per round) to that of a Fireball--Haste comes out far ahead. Alternatively, Deep Slumber drops a single powerful enemy, ending the fight. Casters start winning because of spells like Fly, defenses like Mirror Image, and debuffs/save-or-lose spells like Glitterdust and Deep Slumber.
** No, the Wizard is better at level 1. Color Spray. Also the level 5 awesome for Wizards is Fly, at which point the Fighters can pretty much pack up and go home. See: The huge number of encounters who's offense can be negated by Fly, to the point where a Wizard could plink away with a Crossbow and still win.
Because for being ConversationInTheMainPage. Pro tip, if you start an edit with "no," or "actually," then odds are it ''doesn't belong.''
Also cut:
** This troper has ''never'' seen anyone complaining of the a Barbarian's or Frenzied Berserker's strength bonus (which largely amounts to a super-adrenaline rush for in-game explanation). This despite the fact that by 20th level a human Barbarian/Frenzied Berserker can have a strength score of 39 in a frenzyrage without any sort of magic aid whatsoever. (Normal human maximum at 20th level is 23.) 39 is enough strength to carry around three quarters of a ton without any sort of penalties.

Because basically everyone is totally super-human by level 20 (that's what the high levels ''mean''), and people complain about Frenzied Berserker ''[[GameBreaker all the time]].'' I also trimmed some of the stuff on ''Tome Of Battle'' as a lot of it didn't seem terribly relevant.
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{{CapnAndy}}: I cut an entry about a comic where a wizard dies because he picks up a grenade and doesn't know what it is, because that has ''fucking nothing'' to do with the trope.

RossN: ''(This makes no sense when you consider how Muggles in even the most realistic of legends are quite capable of matching with magicians...think Beowulf.)''

I admit I'm not hugely familiar with Beowulf but when and where does he fight a magician?

At least in most of the legends I recall, {{Muggles}} either could not defeat magic users at all, or do so through some measure of trickery and/or divine aid (like Odysseus facing Circe or any number of sorcerors who end up defeated in duels with Christian saints).
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{{Ceniac}}: I removed the following from the WorldOfWarcraft section since it's stretching the truth just to complain about a character class, and isn't really relevant to this trope anyway.
** As if to prove the point Feral Druids do not scale at all and are quickly made useless at endgame when all other classes have gear that makes them better, Feral Druids just have gear.
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{{joeyjojo}}: Umm… Isn't this article just [[ComplainingAboutShowsYouDontLike complaining about gameplay mechanics?]]

{{Tanto}}: No. There's a valid point here, and it's explicated, reasoned out, and defended. You can't just put a game here because you happen to not like its mechanics, which is what CASYDL is all about.
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{{Dausuul}}: Removed this bit:

*** It is a valid criticism, considering that one of the explicit stated goals of 4th edition ''was'' to make a pen and paper version of an MMORPG to try to attract WorldOfWarcraft players.

Because it's... well, not true. At all. Even if you consider this to have been the end result, and even if you think the game designers really were trying for this, they never explicitly said anything of the kind - quite the opposite, in fact.

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{{Nornagest}}:

-->This makes no sense when you consider how Muggles in even the most realistic of legends are quite capable of matching with magicians...think Beowulf.

Beowulf never fought a magician that I recall. Grendel, Grendel's mother, the dragon, a few miscellaneous sea monsters, maybe some {{mooks}} that I've forgotten. That's it.

Actually, I'm having a hard time thinking of any properly ''mythological'' battles fitting the straight-up warrior vs. wizard trope. It shows up frequently in later folktales, though.

Also --

-->Something like Truth In Television, when comparing modern military personnel with modern military technology. I can guarantee you that even if it was a general who argued for using nuclear weapons, it was not a general who invented them.

This makes a dim, vague kind of sense if you turn your head and squint, but it's phrased really obliquely and I can't be sure my interpretation is correct. Is the author still around to clarify?

{{Aquillion}}: I removed the Beowulf line. Aside from the obvious objection (what wizard?), there really ''aren't'' very many muggles in mythology -- almost every hero has supernatural backing from somewhere. And there are few official 'wizards' as we'd see them. When people do beat supernatural opponents, it's usually by knowing the rules, exploiting secret weaknesses, or having backing from elsewhere -- Koschei the Deathless is beaten by finding and breaking the egg where he hid his soul; Vasilissa the Beautiful beats Baba Yaga thanks to a magic doll left to her by her mother; and so on. The epic fight between the muscular barbarian and the sinister, mysterious wizard is Newer Than You Think; it's a very modern trope, an adaptation of TheGoodCaptain verses the the evil doctor onto older settings resulting from more modern ScienceIsBad thinking. The people who told older stories didn't see things the same way -- there wasn't as clear a line between the powers of Hercules and the powers of Medea as modern readers necessarily see.
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{{Haven}}: I think the CityOfHeroes example is taking this trope a little too literally. Controllers, Defenders and Blasters are the {{Squishy Wizard}}s of the setting, and Tankers and Scrappers are the Warriors. Someone who's played this game more recently should probably fix it up, make the example more like the second bullet.
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Cambias: I'm cutting out the Superman/Captain Marvel/Batman example because I can't tell what in God's name it has to do with this trope, plus it's in the wrong section anyway.
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Would this be a bad time to point out that if a wizard's power grows exponentially (as stated in the trope description), it is in fact going up a damn sight faster than quadratically?