No such thing.
Um, no, you added a bunch of rules that don't exist in D&D . That's hardly the "lowest standards possible".
So you are arguing that if half the party dies every single day they are a viable party? Since the goal is to demonstrate weak parties are weak, viable would be not losing people every single day. If there's one death to bad luck that's fine, if there's any sort of consistent death that is not.
I have no idea what that means. How is time determined? What is the goal of the day? I mean, is there a schedule?
By the rules of the game. You won't hit the 16 hour time limit unless you're deliberately stalling (the adventure is completable in under 30 minutes) so that's really just there to say no resting.
If you want the adventure hook make a party, I'm not letting you custom build to handle this specific scenario.
Non-weather based? What the fuck does that even mean?
Sandstorm, Frostburn, and Stormwrack are all weather based.
Yeah, your scenario doesn't model a 'standard adventuring day'. Primarily because there is no 'standard' for adventuring days. Plus, you have five conditions for loss and only one condition for victory, which you already admit you have stacked against the party with your bizarre conditions. You haven't defined 'weak' in regards to the characters, the party, or the opposition. And I have grave doubts that you would consider an encounter successfully passed if the party was able to garner the loot or whatever without killing the opposition, which is a primary survival technique in older versions.
Sure there are. The reason the conditions are listed as they are is because basket weavers are weasels. They will seriously attempt to claim that if one guy has 1 HP left but they beat all encounters they won.
Getting the loot off something without killing it would be immensely more difficult than just killing it, so I consider it irrelevant.
To summarize: You want a low-ish hit point party to run a WoW type raid on the desktop, where the resource they need the most is the one that can't be marshaled because you are pushing them into no-way-out combats of attrition.
Lowish HP party? If you actually care about HP of all things...
"Adept, Aristocrat,
Barbarian, CA Ninja, Commoner,
CW Samurai, Expert,
Fighter (dungeoncrasher or not), Healer,
Hexblade,
Knight,
Marshal,
Monk,
Paladin,
Ranger, Rogue, Scout,
Soulknife, Spellthief,
Swashbuckler, Warlock, Warmage, Warrior."
Anything with D8 or better is bolded.
If you're worried about HP attrition then not only was I correct in assuming you fail at D&D, but you also are not nearly as "creative" as you claim.
Seriously, this entire scenario can be facerolled by a solo Bard, so stop being pussies.
Alrighty, NPCs from the 3.5 DMG, clearly a non-optimized party:
Jugs the Barbarian 7th lvl mostly wants to drink and hit things.
Swordmeister the Fighter 7th lvl really, really likes his sword.
Goodguy the Paladin 7th lvl wants to get Jugs off the sauce and on to the straight and narrow.
Filthy Peeks the Rogue 7th lvl wants to make enough seed money to start a brothel.
Ok. Post exact statblocks including all items, and we'll start.
Actually, the Bone Devil party would not necessarily have to lose, given these conditions. If the point of the mission was 'kill this particular enemy', they would have had to complete the mission in a single day without losing anyone, but they shouldn't have lost anyone to a creature of their CR. They should have expected to expend around 20-25% of their daily resources to win.
I won't count one death as a loss if it's a bad luck death. If it isn't, if it's something that'd happen every day a death a day to routine stuff is not sustainable either. If this were the Bone Devil thing (which was a single fight, and a level lower) any death at all should have really been an automatic loss. And since it could have easily killed one of those guys... but let's focus on the actual point of this thread?
And you're probably right. These are standard basket weavers so I fully expect for them all to act the part of such. I am inviting them to prove me wrong, let's see if they can.