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No, a third level spell should just not let you ignore significant portion of the game's encounters and charge up all your powers. And of course even if the enemies would take some action to strengthen their position outside the bubble, that strengthening is unlikely to be more than what the...

What does this represent in the fiction? What is the caster actually doing to charge up these spells? Can they do it out of combat too, and if not, why not?

I mean this is now a hybrid of spell slot and point system, which I necessarily do not find terribly elegant. And of course once you start adding similar limitations to the second highest slot as they are pretty powerful too, it gets even closer to slots. I think if one wants to use spellpoints...

The rules don't support it well now and in a no attrition model they would support it even less. Because once the party has access to revivify or similar, in attritionless model casting it cannot have cost. So one character dying has no cost as they can be brought back without a cost.

Yes, but there are certain advantages to the slot system. It is not necessarily desirable to have quantity directly transferable to quality.

Right. But if you have a 33% chance of a TPK in every fight, that's gonna be a short campaign! Right. That's what I m trying to get at. At attrition model the characters can get beat and barely survive a third encounter and that point they might decide to abandon the mission and retreat...

First, running away, especially if you have already taken some beating is insanely difficult in 5e. Most likely you just get killed even more easily. And second, if effective retreat was possible, then the full-refresh encounter model would become even more unworkable, as the character could...

This means you need to specifically concoct enemies that would take such actions. Like some random encounter dire owlbear is not going to do that. It invalidates a huge section of enemies. It simply is a terrible spell that goes against the core idea of the encounter balance design. It should...

So I am not actually sure it is necessary for high level casters to still have the lowest levels of slots. It results of having a lot of slots, and is also annoying to manage. I think at some point the lowest level slots should just start converting to higher level slots instead of being retained.

Yes, but we are not talking about adventuring day model, we are talking about a full-resources-at-every-fight model, with those fights still being challenging. So what is the acceptable chance of a defeat (thus probably a TPK) for a fight to count as challenging? An actual answer, please.

I am not a biggest fan of this. Now some extrapolation based on character background is pretty much fine. Like a player deciding in middle of the session what the character's favourite bar is like can be seen just really being about the character; the player should be able to define in what sort...

OK, but taking a fifth level or higher party, what is acceptable chances of a TPK for a fight to be challenging? 40%, 20%, 10%? Because any of these tend to me that a TPK will happen in a few sessions. Is that acceptable to you?

But now they don't even need to do that!

You certainly can challenge a party like that. You just need to scale up the encounter difficulty a lot. And we really have no guidance for that, but this is really not the difficult part: it is still perfectly doable. The issue is that once you do this, the game becomes super deadly. Like I...

Being about as effective in combat than a fighter for free is a big deal! In older editions casters could not do this, to do so did cost spell slots.

But there are now endless cantrips, which scale with levels. In older editions if a caster wanted to do something useful, they had to burn a spell slot. This is not the case any more.

Yeah, some sort of fronts. GM can decide things, but it would be super helpful if there actually was some sort of scaffolding for the GM to build upon and it would set the expectation to the players of such things progressing due the rests being a normal part of the game. Lacking that indeed...

I just finished running the third session of an ongoing political intrigue arc in my D&D campaign. We have used plenty of the rules. Skills, spells, also some combat (what is political intrigue without some assassins?) Works very well.

Sure, but one day is not a lot of time and keeping constant time pressure at such a pace becomes contrived. Also, what is the GMing advice in the books for doing this?

I agree that there are issues and I agree that a day of time passing often is not a meaningful cost, but I also do not think that any RPG can function if the players do not care about the fiction at all.