How to lower an encounter level without anything too drastic?

[Goaty14]

I'm doing a PbP on these forums. If you're in that game GET OUT!

So basically the players are doing pretty badly against a some outsiders that I sent at them. They're barely getting past DR and etc, so I want to tone down the difficulty of the encounter without blatantly telling them that they won by DM-Intervention.

For reference, the party is composed as so:

Deus & Du'os (https://www.myth-weavers.com/sheet.html#id=1379000)
Jacub Lumber (https://www.myth-weavers.com/sheet.html#id=1380567)
Böse Toten (https://www.myth-weavers.com/sheet.html#id=1384526)
Inti (https://www.myth-weavers.com/sheet.html#id=1383160)


Suggestions?

[Hunter Noventa]

If you're already in the middle of the encounter, it might be a bit late to do anything but say, start ignoring the DR behind the screen.

The Outsiders could also retreat after enough combat, perhaps with a parting jibe like 'we've stalled these fools long enough, they cannot stop our master's work now!' which also gives you a plot hook.

[denthor]

If one of the enemy is a coward. They run.

If in the backfield they stop since things are going well for their side.


If one is overconfident they put themselves in more danger allowing flanking we are winning.

If evil they decide to buff themselves or turn on themselves. This can happen after the heroes are run off the field. They just kill the down members of the team losers did not pull there weight in the fight.

I have seen all of these things in an evil game player against player

[Zeb]

The Summoning duration runs out on some of the outsiders?

After dropping a player they consider their contract fulfilled and pop back to their home plane?

Depending on the type of outsider maybe one of them demands a solo combat challenge?

Without seeing what type of outsiders just your player stats they should be able to handle things in their CR wheelhouse, maybe have the outsiders get overconfident/sloppy?

[tyckspoon]

The easiest change to make mid-combat is probably lowering the enemies' HP. You always have the option of actually rolling HP instead of taking the calculated averages for monsters, and you can simply have 'rolled low' for their HP totals. This would cause them to be defeated or consider retreating earlier than they otherwise would have without requiring you to retcon or start 'forgetting' any traits that you may have already revealed to the party like DR or the monster's to-hit bonuses.