Yeah I'm still playing Yu-Gi-Oh master duel and I'm still going to talk about it but first I want to talk about the WIZARD PROBLEM.
YGO is an incredible achievement in card games, in which they fully substituted all game design for swag. There's half a dozen symbols on any given card that mean basically nothing in and of themselves and only have gained meaning as card text refers to them. One of the many examples of this is the card's Attribute, one of six(sometimes seven, why not) elements printed in the top right corner of the card. This attribute describes the card's vibe and has no INHERENT meaning. It only comes up if a card refers to the attribute and does something to cards that have it.
So you'd really think that what's printed in the top of the card could not possibly make the card better or worse, but that would be wrong. This is because the game's designers have tended quite consistently to make the game's strongest monsters LIGHT or DARK attribute. Why? Vibes, obviously. If you have the elements FIRE, WATER, WIND, EARTH and then LIGHT and DARK, you have four elements with very specific expectations related to physical phenomena and then two much more abstract ones. If something seems cool or special or like it doesn't fit in with traditional four elements, it gets thrown in the special categories.
Over time, this ends up meaning that anything that helps DARK or LIGHT cards tends to be better, because design has just gotten in the habit of assigning cool cards those vibes. There's nothing approaching a style guide for this game and since attribute doesn't have any inherent meaning, it is ruled by the imagination of the designers, and so power and versatility tends to accumulate in the categories that have less rules governing what they should do or be.
I call this the WIZARD PROBLEM because it comes up most around wizards, because wizards can do anything and that's the whole problem. When I was very little and made older boys play dungeons and dragons with me, I wanted to be a wizard, because what else would you want to be in a game with magic? There was a page for rogues to pick locks and about 1/3 of the Player's Handbook was devoted to spells you could cast. It turns out that it's hard to imagine meaningful variations on a Fighter hitting someone Very Hard, but extremely easy to imagine a million different magical spells when there's basically no limits to what a wizard can do.
The WIZARD PROBLEM is when game balance is horribly skewed not for any systemic or design reason, but because there are too few constraints and too much room for imagination to run wild. Yet the WIZARD PROBLEM is difficult hard to balance even with intentional pushback and built in systemic constraints because being able to Do More Things is really, really strong even if there's all sorts of limitations around it. Wizards (or things with the same vibe as wizards, it's all the same, that's the point) often end up infringing on the turf of everyone else and even if they've got a limited version of say, picking locks or whatever, they can still do that plus shoot a fireball at someone, which is usually not something anyone can do. Without some very intentional symmetrical design just throwing a restriction on being able to Do Anything isn't enough.
That being said, Wizards rule and game balance sucks. So is the WIZARD PROBLEM really a problem? The unconsciousness of the bias is the part that I think is most genuinely an issue; it's fine to make something stronger and cooler on purpose, but I think being able to Do Anything actually kind of ends up boring. Not just mechanically, it's pretty narratively boring as well; no limitations just lead to Magic and Wizards and when there's no limitations the setting will simply become Magic and Wizards if there aren't any constraints. Any sufficiently unrestricted ability is indistinguishable from magic. That's one thing I love about any given Shounen Jump comic with fighting in it; everyone is using dream logic magic to fight, but having ridiculously specific powers and weaknesses and constraints leads to very dynamic and tense drama. There's stakes and meaning to what's happening, even when it's all made up on the spot.
I think a bong-smoking wizard that shows up to rock everyone's world and vanish in a poof of smoke rocks, but that rules because they're above the rules of the story and the game, not hacking it from the inside. These are my thoughts on the WIZARD PROBLEM follow for more discussion of the WIZARD PROBLEM.
to try to solve this problem by declaring "anything a wizard can do someone else can do better". Wizards don't get a fireball spell unless there's also a pyrotechnician class that can make bigger and better fireballs. Take one step beyond that big open field of imagination and ask yourself, "so if wizards can do this, who else can too?"
(This is approximately the approach Magic takes with colorless cards, I suppose: they get to do anything but always at a worse rate than whichever colors those things belong to.)
I only scratched the surface of this but my BASIC answer to this is in this circumstance the wizard is still absolutely the most busted character in the game. Being able to do even an okay version of ANYTHING is such incredible versatility, and then you get into the ways even mediocre versions of those abilities can combine in unintended ways. A corollary to the WIZARD PROBLEM is that versatility is inherently really strong.
In fighting games this also comes up quite a lot; I think Seth in the Street Fighter series is a good recent example of someone with tons of tools what ended up quite hard to balance because he could simply do anything. Lateral balancing measures like weaker abilities and lower health didn't really keep him down until they severely exaggerated them. Being able to do more stuff means there are less circumstances that character is without an option, meaning that this versatility starts to cover up an important weakness as well. Every character in the game is probably better than the WIZARD at something, but if the WIZARD is better than that character at every other game state, they can win by shifting it to literally any other circumstance.
So I think it's worth asking not just "who else can do this" but "what can't this character do?"
Personality and definition comes from what you can't do as much as what you can; the traditional way this came up in Dungeons and Dragons was that WIZARDS could do anything, but they couldn't heal. This isn't a big limitation, but it sort of gives them a bit of character? They can only change and destroy, not repair or heal? It's still way too broad but it already gives them a bit of character.
The opposite of this comes up a lot Slay the Spire and other deck-building scenarios: that if you try to make your deck be able to do too many things, it can easily get so large that it fails because it won't necessarily be able to draw the right cards at the right time.
This is also indirectly touched upon in @bruno's Compleat History of Magic the Gathering when he talks about how early on in the tournament scene, folks had not figured out a lot of the best practices for deck building.
D&D approximates "not being able to switch between different expertise" with spell slots and prepared spells. There's plenty of caveats there like how heavy of a role combat plays and how higher levels mean access to enough to be a walking magic Swiss army knife.
But I wonder whether limiting the ease with which wizards change their abilities around might help alleviate the Wizard problem some?
