I have 5 players in my upcoming Kingmaker game and I'm unsure how to best handle XP and encounters. The group wants XP, so using milestone is not an option (unless I really don't find another solution and put my foot down). I have come up with 2 possible solutions:
1:
Simply adjusting all encounter XP-budgets for 5 players by adding creatures and/or the Elite template as appropriate would be the most obvious solution. But while I haven't read through the whole AP yet, I've already seen a handful of severe or even extreme encounter against single enemies. I can't really apply Elite to a level+4 creature without very likely killing the party. And for some of these encounters I have no idea how to add an additional creature without it feeling shoehorned.
2:
An alternative would be running all encounters as written, effectivly reducing the XP they gain by 20%. That would make the first dozen or so encounters much easier, but the party would most likely fall behind one level before long to balance things out. That would be fine for most encounters, but again the Extreme encounters don't seem to make this viable. Even with 5 characters, fighting a level+5 creature is too much.
I gravitate towards the first solution if it could make a few encounters feel artifically inflated. But I thought it wouldn't hurt to ask how other GMs have handled groups of more-than-4.
In general, you want 1200XP or 1500XP if you add custom content.
You should simply add an additional creature. If it's a single enemy, add a low level enemy to balance the XP.
In other APs you might get away with throwing 4 player encounters at 5 players, but due to potential overleveling and the absence of a lot of extreme and severe encounters, I think you absolutely need to scale up encounters in terms of XP
I'm not adding much custom content. Only the occasional random encounter. Oh, and I have the Companion guide. Guess I'll have to look into that to see how much more XP the party an get from there. But going with 1200 XP might be a good call, thanks!
Adding enemies is the best solution mechanically but it doesn't make much sense story-wise for a number of encounters. Some are meant to be memorable exactly because they pit the party against a single overpowering foe like an apex predator. I guess I can add a much weaker "copy" of these as mate/offspring and hope the group doesn't catch on to the fact that it's unlikely each and every one of them has "apex junior" tagging along.
Why not a mixture of both solutions?
For most encounters you can adjust for the added party member, but for the single creature severe-to-extreme encounters, run as written.
That way the entirety of the xp budget should not result in the party being significantly underleveled, and you might even add additional small challenges or encounters to bridge the gap
The group is mostly quite efficient at building and using their characters. Kingmaker doesn't have THAT many severe+ encounters from what I have seen and leaving only those unscaled will probably make them much easier to handle than I want them to be.
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Thank you both for your comments and suggestions. I think I will set the XP to 1200, and scale all encounters up for 5 player. For exploration/random encounters the party can always flee if things get too bad and the main story stuff seems to mostly trigger from them being the appropriate level anyway.