Quote Originally Posted by Vahnavoi View Post
they cannot function as guards, or scouts, or a variety of other military roles you'd expect to find these classes in.
They cannot function effectively in those rules, but it's not like missing out on Spot makes you blind. A Fighter is perfectly capable of accomplishing a "go over there and see what's over there" objective, they have a move speed and eyeballs. They're just not as good at it as a Rogue or a Ranger. This is exactly what you would expect from a class which is underpowered rather than one which is nonfunctional.

With a case like that, you can just pick the spell that fits a game best and then ditch or ignore the other. It does not have similar overarching implications to a game as the other examples of malsense.
Alright, suppose that's the only version of fireball. Suppose it's even worse and only does 1 point of damage ever. Is that "malsense"? No. It's just a thing that's bad. "Bad" and "dysfunctional" are different things, and it is useful to be able to talk about them with different terms. You can fix dysfunctional things with editing, you can't fix underpowered things that way. Hell, by this standard we can move the Fighter from "malsense" to "underpowered" simply by printing a Soldier class that is good at soldier-ing, and that's just not consistent with how people use "dysfunctional" in rules conversations. You can't make wish not do broken stuff by adding a parallel "heart's desire" spell.