That sucks. I'd spill my coke on that dude and his stuff. Repeatedly.
That's bullxxxx.
Not to say that the Wizard should be protected by the DM, but that's just asking for it.
He..actually, THEY since there were 3 or 4 DMs with that attitude in our group(our group had 12 people in it, 8 of which were DMs, we voted on which game to play each week) felt that it was tactically the best idea for enemies. After all, if you could make ONE attack and remove someone from the battle who could possible fireball your entire 20 Orc army and kill them all, it seemed a much better idea than wasting an attack on a heavily armored fighter that you were likely to miss and even if you did hit wouldn't reduce their HP to 0, so they'd keep fighting you.
Any attempt to argue against it would be met with the same reasoning: Sorry, you needed to die, you were the biggest threat while simultaneously being the easiest to kill. And there are no rules about what happens when the enemies run past your allies, your allies can't stop them from getting past them and nothing bad happens to the enemies...so why wouldn't they just run past them to kill you? (obviously, this was a 2e game, so no AOOs) *I* didn't kill you, the monsters did. I was just role playing them correctly.
Which led to a bunch of people who said "Alright, that reasoning is sound...they would legitimately want to kill me first. But it isn't fun to die all of the time. So maybe it's good to best to sometimes purposefully run the enemies in a non-optimal way to make the game more fun. Rule number one, don't attack the wizard....it's not fun."
That's not my experience in 4E (earlier editions, sure, a surrounded wizard was toast unless he could go invisible or something). The 4E first level Iron Mage was one of the first ideas talked about.
My wizard in 4e went the first...4 or 5 adventures without having a single attack aimed at him. They were all Living Forgotten Realms adventures, so about 3 battles per adventure. Most battles, enemies attacked the nearest person to them or were marked by the defenders and attacked them. The first time enemies really targeted him was when we fought some Leaping Spiders(or whatever they are called) that were able to shift 10 or something, so they used that to get past the front line and attack me. If it wasn't for my Eladrin teleport I might have died that combat. As soon as I teleported away, they focused on the PCs closer to them and I wasn't attacked again.
As for not being surrounded, that's a result of the segregated room concept that many modules have. DMs are trained to run and design adventures that are so linear (i.e. the kobolds in room 3 do not attack because they do not hear anything in room 2, err, what?).
Yes, this is exactly why we don't get surrounded.
