A rant of d&d, PnP, nwn and Arelith for you.
In the spirit of d&d, going against a powerful wizard should be a little unnerving.
Finger of death kills you and as you are about to roll the dice, you feel how this can highly alter the outcome of the battle.
A lot of what was made seems made with impactful dice rolls in mind, to be enjoyed and/or complained about around a table without much rush, as people did.
Base Nwn somewhat has this too, though at a much faster pace than PnP. Arelith went a bit away from it with the enchantment system with high control of gear properties, though is still often there in pve (but also often is not).
The fighter, by contrast, felt like a more steady progress - a hit was good/bad and often happened, but usually wasn't immeadiately gamechanging.
Some of our problems comes from going against the spirit of the original design - but on the other hand, the original design wasn't made with nwn in mind and so some deviation seems natural.
Suppose finger of death had a chance to permanently delete a character, some of the spirit would be restored - knowing this potential would make it unnerving to fight a wizard. It also wouldn't be very fun, but fun to type.
Mordenkainen's disjunction with a chance to destroy a magical item - very unnerving.
For Arelith, a variant of effects on a succesful save sounds promising. If wizards and sorcerers had some guarantee of partial progress for save spells (but not other casters), they might retain some of the original intent while feeling distinct from other spellcasters.
Finger of death: you lived, but your con was reduced by 4 for a while (in addition to the damage it normally does).
Hold monster: you made it, but you must additionally roll for 50% chance of 1 round stun.
As an addition to the current spells, only for wiz/sor, it should be a smaller change than changing save spells for all or changing how much save boost pc's can have.
Also I wish to rant on some silly melee vs arcane things (that might still be where they're supposed to be).
You see our legendary fighter Toby Huskmuscle had exterminated the orc threat from the lands, terrorized every tavern and shown people who could drink the most and single-handedly held the docks against the attack of the fishmen and the mega squid.
But old age was setting in and Toby was starting to consider retiring. Fortunately, Toby was an absolute master of the arcane language - some through training, but mostly he had gained items from his many conquests, that granted mastery of the subject.
So Toby went to the local Arcane University and took up a job, lecturing the towns promising would-be wizards. In fact, he was so good at this, that he was able to make a few corrections when his boisterous nature landed him an argument with the local professor.
He wasn't quite skilled in tutoring or arcane research, so much as he wouldn't like to admit it, the wizards still kind of was able to do some things, he couldn't he supposed. Easily fixed by drinking them under the table though.
Seemingly, whatever went into researching spells was still over his head. He also wasn't really proficient in scribing the scrolls, but fortunately, the actual activation sequence, understanding their effects and recognising them in the heat of battle, was much simpler and this he held mastery of, to the point that even the most bearded wizard had to give it to him.
Unfortunately Toby was not a catious soul and when he eventually decided to dabble in magical research on his own, his foot was turned into a chicken. A troublesome problem that was theorized much upon and eventually solved, though his foot would still sometimes loudly bawk "KykelikyYYYYYYYYY!" at 7 am on the first monday of every month.