Do caster out of combat options matter?

[Psyren]

To see if the soul of their avenged father went to haven after they defeated their nemesis death knight...

Make mont Celestia NOW!
True Story

You don't have to, like, demand your DM make an entire portal/map to Celestia to learn that though Just have your avenged father visit your dream set on a bright sunny cloud or something. (Oh look, something else you don't need a spell for!)

Also, and this is a tangent, I find that people often assume the game world knows exactly as much about magic as needed to make it as effective as possible. In this case, the murderer doesn't think about foiling Speak with Dead, so the spell is just assumed to solve an entire adventure in a single casting.

Yeah, and I think both can be fun. Some murders should be solveable instantly by "lol we have a cleric" and others should involve a murderer who actually grew up in that world with more than two brain cells and thus knows these things exist. The problem arises when you take a group that is expecting one and put them up against the other, or when you don't put enough thought into either to make them satisfying.

If that is a wizard's spellbook and they never get to meaningfully use those spells then yes, the campaign sucks. I'd put the bar at around 25%, if you don't meaningfully contribute at least 6 times with those spells then it's a bad campaign.

Where's the combat stuff? In the other PCs character sheet. Combat is only 1 of 3 pillars. And you are only 1 of 3-6 players. A wizard with that spellbook is a godsend to a party in a well written campaign.

Edit- I feel I need to stress this. It's not all or nothing, sort of. It's something or nothing. A DM who wants the players to go to another plane but doesn't make that possible will have to get comfortable with failure. But if it doesn't even matter that the cleric just so happens to have the right tuning fork, then we have a problem.

So a party that lacks a full caster but still wants to participate if the adventure involves mystery-solving and planehopping = tough cookies, they made their choice;

But a party whose wizard (or worse, anything with fixed spells known) that loaded up on utility spells and therefore is practically down a member when it comes to combat = the DM who doesn't accommodate that choice runs bad campaigns and should feel bad.

Isn't there a bit of a double standard there?