I was sick during this session and did not play, and on top of that, my husband had lost his voice since we had gone to a concert (Sabaton and Battle Beast) the night before. So, our back-up DM took over to run more of the dungeon we had started the previous session. We advised him to bring his paladin along since the dungeon is designed to be rather difficult and without Del, Balthasar might have ended up as the only tank if we had a similarly low turn-out – which is exactly what happened.
So, from what our backup DM told us, the party (consisting of Bobby the wizard, Mistress Mau the druid, Hazudra the monk, Andelle the druid, and the backup DM’s Paladin Balthasar) got through one room in which there were supposed to be eight (8) giant wolf spiders (CR 1/4)… except Balthasar misread the dungeon map and just saw Giant Spider, which happens to be a CR 1. The fight would have killed the entire party had Balthasar wanted it to, but he tuned them down a bit. The party triumphed, poked their head in the next room and then immediately got transported by a broken portal (the idea was to scatter the party, but he just had everyone turn up in the cramped top floor of the tower).
All in all, it did not seem to have turned out too badly, although the spiders may end up with the group expecting more experience than it would normally get. Balthasar gave then the full experience for the encounter even though he did not run the spiders to their full potential.