How balanced should a game be?

[Cronocke]

Typically I see these problems more often in point buy systems than class based systems, though they can happen with power gamers in any system. One of the advantages of classes over point buy is that they force a player to not choose completely optimized characters. With a well designed class system, it should be hard to create a character that is only useful in a single situation.

Monks and fighters in Pathfinder and D&D, every edition except 4th, are useful in basically zero situations, unless the GM bends over backwards to make them valuable. The latter tanks worse than a cleric, and does damage about as well as one. The monk doesn't even have that going for it. Paladins and barbarians are a slight improvement at best. Rogues have the main advantage of being able to use magic items and having loads of skill points. Half of the classes in the core rulebook are flat out worse than the other half, sometimes to an extreme degree.

So, the iconic class-and-level game makes half or more of the classes bad.

Now, you may say that it's not a well-designed class system, to which I'd agree, but then what is? Does Legends of the Wulin count, in which your class mostly determines what skill you use to regain chi, and what bits of lore you get for free (though there are factions you can join that do bigger things)? Are World of Darkness games class systems, since you choose a supernatural type, subtype, and faction?

As far as your experiences with point buy, well, I could point to my own experiences in such systems and how everyone in the games I've played has tended to make a character with one specialty and then spread the rest of their points so that they have a little bit of training in a lot of other fields too. It really says more about the people you're gaming with than the system itself. I've had pleasant games in Pathfinder and D&D with pleasant company, but I could never quite ignore the sheer class imbalance in the game.

 

[Neonchameleon]

Monks and fighters in Pathfinder and D&D, every edition except 4th, are useful in basically zero situations, unless the GM bends over backwards to make them valuable. The latter tanks worse than a cleric, and does damage about as well as one.

Not true at all. In 3.X, yes you are right about the fighter. In 2e and with Unearthed Arcana the fighter gets Weapon Specialisation; +1 to hit, +2 damage, and 3 attacks/2 rounds, rising as levels rise.

Even in pre UA 1e the fighter was slightly weak - but had something subtle going for them. Fighters chould use swords, clerics couldn't. Which meant two things:
1: The loot table severely favoured the fighter (most magic weapons are swords, and I think only swords go up to +5)
2: Swords do more damage against big enemies, which is a stealth damage buff to the fighter as you level up and fight more big enemies.

The monk doesn't even have that going for it.

The 1e monk was a minor rogue variant. But rogues were pretty awful and non-high-level monks were worse.

Now, you may say that it's not a well-designed class system, to which I'd agree, but then what is?

Apocalypse World and a lot of its offspring (especially Monsterhearts). As I said on another thread, the strength of a class based game is that within the overarching game you can have each player playing an almost separate game tailored to them. Leverage is also a decent bare-bones class based game although only just qualifies.

Apocalypse World by the way is an excellent game although Vincent Baker's writing can be ... divisive.

Are World of Darkness games class systems, since you choose a supernatural type, subtype, and faction?

Technically. They aren't a very good example.

 

[Celebrim]

Not true at all.

I agree.

In 3.X, yes you are right about the fighter.

After about 4th level, yes. 3.X suffered in its initial release from a lack of play testing at high level. 3.5 suffered from the fact that making money in the short term was seen as a more important goal than making a good game.

However, prior to 3.X, if you had good stats, arguably the fighter was the strongest class in the game.

Even in pre UA 1e the fighter was slightly weak - but had something subtle going for them. Fighters chould use swords, clerics couldn't. Which meant two things:
1: The loot table severely favoured the fighter (most magic weapons are swords, and I think only swords go up to +5)
2: Swords do more damage against big enemies, which is a stealth damage buff to the fighter as you level up and fight more big enemies.

There are a couple of important points you are missing. One of the most important of these is that the Fighter's saving throw table improved more steadily and to a greater degree than any other class. Another is that Fighter's benefited from high strength and constitution more than any other class until Barbarian showed up in the UA. The constitution bonus for non-fighter classes was capped at +2. This meant that it was nearly impossible for a non-fighter class to get enough hit points to survive a typical end game burst of damage. As such, there was very little option but to have fighter meat shields. While the cleric could in theory heal himself, he couldn't survive getting hit hard in order to do so.

The strength bonus to hit and damage for non-fighters was capped at +1/+3.

Post UA, they had weapon specialization which meant that they could pretty much beat down any monster in the game. Using something like a two-handed sword or a hammer of thunderbolts (with ideally gauntlets of ogre power), you had a character that was basically an unstoppable force. He was almost impossible to hit. He almost never failed a saving throw, and he conceivably could have more hit points than Tiamat if you really played him to high level. And fully geared up with a girdle, weapon, and gauntlets he could basically deal the equivalent of a meteor swarm's damage to a target every round - hardly anything in the game could survive even a single fighter's full attack even if we ignored serious cheese like vorpal swords and intelligent blades with special purposes. Paladin/Cavaliers and Barbarians were really powerful and definitely competed in the meat shield slot, but Paladin's in particular would be a level or so behind fighters in advancement and really needed a Holy Avenger to outshine a fighter.

Additionally, we think of rogues now as skill monkeys, but when they introduced the NWP system it wasn't rogues that earned the most NWP's. Fighters were actually pretty well off in terms of secondary skills.

In 1e, fighter was not the weak link in the party. That honor belonged to the thief. Thieves never got good stuff. At low level none of your skills were reliable and as such a good thief player never used them unless he had to. A thief that relied on his find/remove traps skill was a dead rogue. But by the time you hit high level, your skills were trivially obsoleted by the application of minor magic - find traps, levitation, detect magic, spider climb, invisibility, silence, etc. You were reduced to the level of a henchmen, unable to contribute more than your player could contribute except in minor and non-critical matters. Basically, you tried hard to help your friends conserve their spells and hit points.

Next to the thief, the cleric was the least fun and effective class to play. You basically where a hit point battery that might have minor utility value. You had few spells, few ways to deal effective damage, and not enough hit points to stay on the front line anyway.

The ideal 1e party was generally one cleric to heal and raise dead if needed, one wizard for those times when the text of an adventure said something that amounted to 'cast forget or die' or 'cast stone to mud or die', and a lot of fighter types. If you had space and could keep one alive, add another wizard.

I personally feel most of 3.0's class design problems were overcompensation for the flaws in the class design of 1e. Fighters got gimped hard because every class to a certain extent took their stuff. Clerics and Rogues were deliberately designed to shine, and the shackles were taken off of wizards so that they'd be more fun to play at low level - resulting in them being severely overpowered at higher levels. It was clear the design was done by player's of 1e that knew what problems they needed to address but hadn't fully considered why 1e worked as well as it did.

Ironically, a lot of the best class design can be seen in multiplayer cRPGs where balance has to be taken really seriously and playtesting likewise is taken really seriously.

 

[Neonchameleon]

However, prior to 3.X, if you had good stats, arguably the fighter was the strongest class in the game.

With or without weapon specialisation? Because that made a huge difference.

There are a couple of important points you are missing. One of the most important of these is that the Fighter's saving throw table improved more steadily and to a greater degree than any other class.

Starting out the worst and ending up the best.

Another is that Fighter's benefited from high strength and constitution more than any other class until Barbarian showed up in the UA. The constitution bonus for non-fighter classes was capped at +2. This meant that it was nearly impossible for a non-fighter class to get enough hit points to survive a typical end game burst of damage. As such, there was very little option but to have fighter meat shields. While the cleric could in theory heal himself, he couldn't survive getting hit hard in order to do so.

The strength bonus to hit and damage for non-fighters was capped at +1/+3.

Right. Let's unpick this.

The fighter gained an advantage over other classes for having a constitution of 17 or higher. In other words vanishingly rare if you used the recommended methods of rolling.

The strength bonus to hit and damage was not capped for non-fighters. It was simply that fighters got to roll for exceptional strength (assuming they had a natural 18 strength) and no one else did. If a cleric wears Gauntlets of Ogre Power they gain the full advantage of the Strength 18/00 they are granted.

The two examples you mention require in order a 17 Con and an 18 Str to trigger.

Post UA, they had weapon specialization

Gygax has said on these boards that Weapon Specialisation and the other UA fighter variants (like the Cavalier) were deliberately to try and balance the fighter against the casters. Before that, even despite the fact they gained an army at level 10, they just weren't strong enough.

And the fighter might get advantage out of magic greatswords, but isn't generally much better with a Girdle of Giant Strength and Hammer of Thunderbolts than the Cleric (remember Clerics can wield hammers), meaning that due to opportunity cost that combination should go to the Cleric...

In 1e, fighter was not the weak link in the party. That honor belonged to the thief.

Agreed. The oD&D/AD&D Thief was terrible.

Next to the thief, the cleric was the least fun and effective class to play. You basically where a hit point battery that might have minor utility value. You had few spells, few ways to deal effective damage, and not enough hit points to stay on the front line anyway.

Unless the fighter had miraculously managed a Con of 17 (which I will admit happened far more than chance would indicate) you had a grand total of 1hp/level less than the fighter - and you levelled up faster, meaning that roughly 25% of the time you had one more hit dice than the fighter. Your damage was comparable with a sword and board fighter until you started facing Large monsters (i.e. seldom in the first few levels) - and outside the first few levels you got a fairly decent number of spells. So while I agree that the cleric wasn't fun because everyone leeched their spells (unless they worked on a ransom model) they certainly weren't underpowered compared to the pre-UA fighter.

The ideal 1e party was generally one cleric to heal and raise dead if needed, one wizard for those times when the text of an adventure said something that amounted to 'cast forget or die' or 'cast stone to mud or die', and a lot of fighter types. If you had space and could keep one alive, add another wizard.

More like pre-UA you wanted as many clerics as you could get your hands on - and they would all have more fun if there were more of them because they'd have slots that didn't need to be spent on healing. But that's in many ways a very different group makeup to almost all fighters.

I personally feel most of 3.0's class design problems were overcompensation for the flaws in the class design of 1e. Fighters got gimped hard because every class to a certain extent took their stuff. Clerics and Rogues were deliberately designed to shine

They failed with that on the Rogue...

and the shackles were taken off of wizards so that they'd be more fun to play at low level - resulting in them being severely overpowered at higher levels. It was clear the design was done by player's of 1e that knew what problems they needed to address but hadn't fully considered why 1e worked as well as it did.

Players of 2e not 1e. Had they been 1e players they wouldn't have taken the fighter's army away.

Ironically, a lot of the best class design can be seen in multiplayer cRPGs where balance has to be taken really seriously and playtesting likewise is taken really seriously.

Hardly ironic. Feedback and money both talk. And you get much better feedback in an MMO when you can see what people actually do.

 

[Celebrim]

Quite simply (which isn't to say easily). By getting a massive wall of meat and hiding behind it. The meat in question being hirelings. Or war dogs. And then getting lucky enough to get loot. If you aren't going in with at least a dozen people in your raid you are in trouble - and few people on the first level of the dungeon have burst attacks. Hirelings and charisma are a key part of oD&D and cascade into 1e. You talk about the wizard being hit by a fear trap alongside the fighter - to me this begs the question as to why the wizard was so far forward and there wasn't at least a rank of meat between them and the trap. The best analogy I can use for the wizard in oD&D/1e is a mortar in house to house fighting; one of them can be really useful at the right moment but you either want it deployed dug in in a battery on a scenic overlook, or a single one of them to a platoon. And I don't think I've ever played a 1e or OSRIC first level character of any class that didn't bring at least two war dogs or hirelings on their first adventure to hold the melee line (and then insisted in the hireling's case that they got their share of the loot whether or not they died - or were invalided out on 1hp half way through the adventure).

From memory the brown box has more rules for hirelings than combat, as does Holmes.

All basically true, although as the DM I tended to not enjoy a situation where the PC's had 12 NPC's tagging along with them at all times and tended to punish it from an XP perspective, treating hirelings (even dogs) as henchmen in terms of sucking up XP from defeating monsters even if they couldn't level, and having hirelings demanding shares of loot beyond their pay (again sucking up XP). My preference as a DM was for each player to start 2 PC's and then play the one that survived (or to choose 1 if both survived).

However, while your strategy is viable in practice I didn't see it work much. The problem was not first level. The strategy of using NPC meat shields on the front line to distribute the damage would typically work at level 1-2 to keep the fighters alive and they'd bring the other PCs along with them. The problem was that eventually you'd get passed the point where a 0th level man-at-arms even well decked out was useful as a meat shield. That point certainly occurs when you start facing foes with magical abilities - young dragons, gorgons, medusa, basilisks, hellhounds, NPC wizards, ghosts, etc. Anything more dangerous than a demi-human would tend to render your strategy that you'd been following since 1st level obsolete. But even before that you'd get to the point where the men-at-arms were facing things that would buckle their morale. You could try carefully nurturing henchmen up who could do a better job of holding the line than hirelings, but that was hard too. Eventually you'd reach the point where you'd get hit unexpectedly and all that careful work just be worthless. It was around 4th or 5th level that I typically saw the deaths occur, because really by that point you still only had like 10-12 hit points.

It was far easier to just play an elf Thief/M-U so you at least could wear armor, use more weapons and had an extra half a hit point per level, as well as some occasionally useful thief skills. Or if your DM didn't enforce the demi human level limits strongly, you could go Fighter/M-U for a bigger boost. Or if you had the lucky rolls to do it, play a human and spend the first 4-5 levels of your career as a fighter (or thief if you lacked patience) until you got enough hit points to survive and then let the party power level you back to 4th level as a M-U during the time they were gaining level 5 or 6. You couldn't contribute much during that level as you were just a low level M-U, but ideally the party had picked up a few wands and defensive magic items during that time, and at least you had 20 or so hit points (about the same as if you were an 8th level wizard). Once you finished your trick, the party had a M-U of decent level going forward and your early career as a fighter would barely slow down your advancement at all. After UA, you could even pull a double specialized in staff (or dart!) trick to give your wizard some relatively healthy combat skills in emergencies.

Honestly, the impression I'm getting from you is that your version of 3.5 (?) includes the 3.5 PHB, the 3.0 MM (I seriously doubt you use e.g. the nerfed 3.5 Golems - spot the difference?) - and the 1E DMG.

LOL. Got me in one. Yes, that's pretty much me. Did you manage that out of just the clues in this thread or have you been following me for a while? Actually, it's worse than that. I never really adopted 3.5 at all, and I saw 3.0 entirely through the lens of playing 1e for 15 years or so. Even more so, because by that time I was playing a heavily house ruled 1e that was well on its way to 3e reforms anyway. So while I was in awe of the 3e PH because it was such a clean unified design, I was like, "Harummph. This version of Polymorph Self is broooken!", the first time I read the description and mentally compared it to 1e Polymorph Self (which was darn useful as it was, just for the mobility and disguise). When 3.5 came along mostly I saw it as making the balance problems (other than Haste and Harm) over all worse, so I pretty much decided at that point I was going to fork off. I play something that is more like 3.25, but I've never stopped DMing like I would for 1e. My impression of the 3e DMG was quite literally, "Well, this is a good effort, but its not as useful as the 1e DMG." I never actually bought the 3e version, and house ruled the XP and magical item creation system (which I felt was priced incorrectly). I'm literally playing off the 3e PH, 3e MM, and 1e DMG, although by this point I have basically my own version of the PH, a 600 page house rule document that replaces all 3.X published chargen/advancement rules.

By elevating skills and to a certain extent feats (though I think 5e is likely to provoke me going another step down that route), while weakening spells (and a few other tweaks), and boosting weaker classes directly, I think I've got stronger balance between the classes. I certainly have more flexible base classes. It's not perfect, but for what I want from D&D, I've never been happier with the rules. In theory, I could apply the OSRIC clean up to my 1e house rule concepts to achieve the same thing, but I've no pressing need to and the results would look a lot like 3e anyway. Likewise, I think I could get 5e on a footing I'd enjoy, but I'm in an ongoing campaign and don't have time to really think hard about a new system. Even more likely though, I'd probably do a Celebrim's House Rules version 1.5 where I cleaned up and simplified some rules using inspiration from Pathfinder's combat maneuver language and 5e's advantage mechanic.

 

[Celebrim]

With or without weapon specialisation? Because that made a huge difference.

Definitely with, since my longest stint as a player and at the higher levels of play was with, and I was able to see it first hand then. Without I'm less confident in affirming, because I suspect it depends much more strongly on magic item availability at that point and that gets to be complex in play because certainly M-U's also need magic items to survive.

The fighter gained an advantage over other classes for having a constitution of 17 or higher. In other words vanishingly rare if you used the recommended methods of rolling.

Yes, but who did? I tended to enforce as a DM 4d6 arrange to taste. I did so because I found that it was basically impossible to enforce anything less. If you tried to enforce 3d6 in order, what happened is you were forcing players to play characters that they didn't want to play. In practice, that didn't work. The logical extreme of that was falling on your sword 10 times in a row until the player got a character he wanted. It also tended to lead to party discontent, as that one guy who got the lucky 18 or other lucky roll had a character that radically outclassed everyone else's character. The table's in 1e tended to go: nothing, nothing, nothing, HUGE AMAZING ADVANTAGE. Clerics and wizards without 17+ in their prime requisite were no less weakened as spellcasters than fighters without at least 1 big number in constitution, dexterity, or strength. Perhaps indeed more so. The logical extreme of that was that everyone was cheating because they felt ill used by the system.

Gygax has said on these boards[/URL] that Weapon Specialisation and the other UA fighter variants (like the Cavalier) were deliberately to try and balance the fighter against the casters.

Well, that is probably true, but I have to respectfully disagree with the Colonel. He justifies this move with the typical weak argument of imagining a duel between an M-U and a fighter, and gives pretty weak analysis to boot. The central problem here is that a solo M-U PC does no better under his scenarios, and probably does worse. At least the PC fighter can survive the NPC's lightning bolt or fireball. The PC M-U has a pretty decent chance of dying even if they pass their saving throw, to say nothing of surviving the second such attack. And a PC M-U is not really more likely to save versus 7 simultaneous Charm Person attacks than the PC fighter is, an example that reveals more about the weakness of the design of charm person than it does the design of fighter's or M-U's.

Fundamentally the test of usefulness isn't, "Who in theory would win this one on one fight?", which honestly isn't clear to me in 1e starting the clock at zero for both characters and depends heavily on things like distance the engagement starts at and how much risk the M-U has of being disrupted. Once the fighter gets into melee range, in 1e the fight is very strongly in his favor.

The real test is, "How useful is the character in typical situations of play?"

Before that, even despite the fact they gained an army at level 10, they just weren't strong enough.

The army was irrelevant except as a DM device for changing the narrative focus of play. It was mostly something you had to protect, not something that protected you. It increased the fighter's importance to the campaign maybe, but not his potency as an adventurer.

 

[Neonchameleon]

Or if you had the lucky rolls to do it, play a human and spend the first 4-5 levels of your career as a fighter (or thief if you lacked patience) until you got enough hit points to survive and then let the party power level you back to 4th level as a M-U during the time they were gaining level 5 or 6.

Two levels of fighter was enough IME (admittedly this counts starting with max hit points at first level - and I rolled an 8 when levelling up) - 2d10 hit points off the first two levels and being a dagger specialist meant you could scythe through the enemy at range or even hurt them in melee. Yes, daggers weren't quite as broken as darts at range, but they were more flexible. And the player of the elven Magic User/Fighter/Thief who'd been laughing at me turned green with envy when I hit level 3 as a mage before he was either a level 2 mage or a level 3 thief, and then proceeded to remind him exactly why the party had missed my human fighter when I switched classes. That said I've not played much dungeon crawling at all beyond level 5.

LOL. Got me in one. Yes, that's pretty much me. Did you manage that out of just the clues in this thread or have you been following me for a while?

Pure clues in this thread

By elevating skills and to a certain extent feats (though I think 5e is likely to provoke me going another step down that route), while weakening spells (and a few other tweaks), and boosting weaker classes directly, I think I've got stronger balance between the classes.

All good things that need doing for balance

And on the more recent post, agreed that 3d6 didn't work. But "How useful is a high level PC vs a high level MU in actual play?" It should be a bit of an apples to oranges comparison; the fighter's opposite number is the cleric, and the wizard's the thief. If combat is reached the fighter should win - but with spells like Invisibility and Fly the wizard has tools to ensure that happens a whole lot less.

 

[GMMichael]

Typically I see these problems more often in point buy systems than class based systems, though they can happen with power gamers in any system. One of the advantages of classes over point buy is that they force a player to not choose completely optimized characters. With a well designed class system, it should be hard to create a character that is only useful in a single situation.

"Optimized" implies a certain amount of well-roundedness, I think. I would call it "minmaxed." Granted, classes can be used to channel character creation, but as 3.5E showed us, they can lead down a dark, dirty road.

Monks and fighters in Pathfinder and D&D, every edition except 4th, are useful in basically zero situations, unless the GM bends over backwards to make them valuable.

Well, the GM doesn't really have to bend over backwards. He just needs a game plan, as I said...

May I emphasize (again, if applicable), that the balance of a game is going to rest just as much in the GM's hands as in the ruleset?
. . .
So to bring this up to speed with the OP: a game should be balanced to the extent needed to keep the GM's whims in check.

If a monk or fighter becomes useless, it's because 1) the GM is not giving them a situation in which to shine, and 2) given the D&D/Pathfinder context, the GM isn't providing them with the magic items necessary to keep them in the game. So your wizard can cast fly (pulling him out of close combat), improved invisibility (protecting him from attacks at range), and then maximized fireball (damaging 10 enemies for 60 damage each). Yeah, I'm impressed. Why can't the fighter have a ring of fly, sword of returning, and a periapt of haste - so that his four power-attacks per round deal 1d12+15 damage...er...average 21.5 damage...to four...

Well, you see where I was going, I hope.

 

[Ratskinner]

By "balanced" I mean "every character design choice bring equal". It's a theme I've seen crop up both in discussion of things like D&D and in feedback on my own game design.

<snip>

So my position is fairly clear - balance is OK to an extent, and extreme imbalance is a problem. but when it is the dominant factor in a game, it starts to bore the heck out of me.

What do you think?

I think I kinda agree with you, but maybe for different reasons. However, I do think that it is an important factor to consider in game design.

I think this is one of those weird nomenclature situations where IRL language fails. That is, I've heard people say "The opposite of poverty is not wealth, it's justice." Currently, I feel like the opposite of "imbalanced" is not "balanced", but that people are kinda locked in on that.* The way I see it, its far more important to avoid an "imbalance" than work to provide some kind of "perfect balance". I've played a game (Capes) where everyone was perfectly balanced, mechanically. But that game's mechanics functioned at such an abstracted level that was so very different from what most folks would consider an rpg to be that I don't think it makes much sense to include it. (Not that it wasn't fun or competitive, it was both of those and a fantastic story game!)

So, as I'm sure others have noted, the value of a character design choice (CDC) is context-dependent. That makes it very difficult to design a traditional rpg and even attempt to make all such choices equal, because the relevant context is so variable. I recall a 2e campaign I ran. I eliminated "common" from the list of languages and added regional languages...suddenly the value of anything that let you speak additional languages shot up, because it added flexibility to the ways the party could act. (At one point, the party could only actually all talk to each other when every single one of them was in the room translating for some portion of the others...).

So, the obvious solution is to tighten the focus of the game. I think 4e did this (both in and out of combat) to some extent and that this is the (subtle) source of some of the gripes about it. It also is the source of some disparaging "hot button" words or accusations leveled against it. By which I mean that 4e CDC's simultaneously had more and less obvious impact on your character's capabilities and function during play. Sure, each class had its own selection of fiddly bits that were unique, but they were all unique in exactly the same way. That lead to often profound mutual misunderstandings and disagreements between h4ters and 4vengers (in both directions).

The second, and perhaps less obvious, solution is to back away from the detailed and narratively inflexible nature of the traditional rpg CDC. Games like Fate and MHRP use more "open descriptor" mechanics and often function at a level stepped back from the actual fictional positioning allowing you to fill in the blanks on the fly. However, this has a definite large impact on the feel of play (by increasing a player's author-stance participation) at the table which a lot of players find dissatisfying.

Which is not to say that both of those solutions do not have large advantages and provide the capacity for much tighter "balance" than we are used to from traditional games. They certainly do.

However, ignoring the idea of balance isn't very effective, either. Since you mention that "extreme imbalance" is a problem, I'll not belabor the point. However, I think its far easier to accidentally provide substantial imbalance than you might think, especially if the designer doesn't account for the variety of contexts under which one might suppose the game to cover. Moreover, I don't think that "imbalance" by itself provides very much to the game. Often is just leads to a situation where all games of that ruleset tend to degenerate to a single solution. So, perhaps the best way to approach it is to look to create a kind of "bounded imbalance", although I'm sure that folks will disagree on how tightly "bounded" that should be.

*I'm not sure what I would suggest the opposite of "imbalanced" be: "playable", "reasonable", "fair"...all seem acceptable to me.

 

[Cronocke]

Clearly you guys know a lot about 2e and earlier, so I'll take your word for fighters being badass - though I still wish they had more non-combat options...

If a monk or fighter becomes useless, it's because 1) the GM is not giving them a situation in which to shine, and 2) given the D&D/Pathfinder context, the GM isn't providing them with the magic items necessary to keep them in the game. So your wizard can cast fly (pulling him out of close combat), improved invisibility (protecting him from attacks at range), and then maximized fireball (damaging 10 enemies for 60 damage each). Yeah, I'm impressed. Why can't the fighter have a ring of fly, sword of returning, and a periapt of haste - so that his four power-attacks per round deal 1d12+15 damage...er...average 21.5 damage...to four...

Well, you see where I was going, I hope.

Kind of. But it still falls apart, really, because you're A: assuming the wizard is specced for damage, and B: assuming the fighter is satisfied just declaring charge actions or full attacks every turn.

If the wizard instead goes for crowd control, with spells like summon monster #, color spray, etc. then the fighter's damage dice are irrelevant because everyone trying to fight back is a joke or simply can't. Coup de grace everything unconscious, and buzzsaw through whatever isn't at your leisure.

Meanwhile the wizard still has ways to participate in non-combat things because his high Int gives him loads of skill points, and he has enough class skills that he can get good rolls in a lot of them. Not to mention using spells to get through the situation. The fighter? His Int is probably a 10 or something, so he's looking at the bare minimum of 2 or 3 depending on race... stand in the corner and wait for a signal, fighter, you can't help here.