Thomas Shey
Legend
I think you dont understand, it was every opponent, how spellcasting worked in that edition was, if you lose initiative and you were casting a spell, if you got hit at all the spell dropped and it was gone, you lost the spell slot and the spell will not go off.
like unless your team really makes a good defensive position, hell if they have decent ranged attacks this was a total issue lol.
I should note there was not a thing in OD&D at least that said word one about spellcasters losing spells when hit. Being hit was bad because you had really cruddy hit points, but again, that still required that opponents could get to you easily and/or had ranged attacks. That got progressively harder after you got to 5th level because of various spells that became available.
(Now, you can argue that there was far more variation here depending on what specific spells were available, but early on given how common scrolls were as treasure, that required a GM to proactively avoid making certain spells available for it not to be true. Outdoors something as simple as Levitation could make a mage effectively immune to opponents without ranged attacks, and Protection Normal Missiles could screen out many opponents ability to harm him completely. These were second and third level spells respectively).