I'm currently running the Kingmaker Adventure Path for a group of six players in weekly 3 and a half hour sessions. While I am a fairly experience GM I've not had much experience with Pathfinder before, certainly not at campaign scale. The same for most of my players.
Now we're a few sessions in the players have been examining XP awards. So far I've stuck to the Medium advancement track as recommended, however when adjusted for 6 players this can end up with them gaining less experience per encounter than expected
Similarly are the rewards for completing quests and exploring hexes individual or group based? I've been assuming they're group based and have handed out 15 XP per hex and 65 XP per quest completed. Is this correct or have I been dreadfully under compensating them?
I have been keeping a detailed record of rewards so it shouldn't be hard to adjust them if I have to.
Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
Flagging to move to the Kingmaker AP sub board, so that you get the best answers and help.
Having said that, 100 XP per hex is the party exploration award, and should be divided amongst the group.
Don’t worry about that too much, but you might want to buff encounters a bit to make up for the encounter XP differential, or just go for milestone XP (harder to do right in Kingmaker due to sandbox nature).
Adding a few monsters to encounters will make up for the increased player numbers AND give you more XP for the greater number of players.
Kingmaker tends to assume that about 1/3 of the XP to level up 4 players will come from hex exploration and kingdom growth; you may need to provide some additional sources of XP for 6 players. Fortunately Kingmaker is very modular and you can drop in some extra encounters or subplots with great ease, as well as buffing individual encounters.
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There are some very useful 6-player conversions pinned to the Kingmaker sub-forum to help you keep things challenging for a larger group.
If you do use the 6-player conversions it's probably a good idea to Add +50% for the quest/exploration/kingdom benchmark rewards. Otherwise your players will be slightly behind expected level in the early stages of the campaign (those rewards aren't so significant to affect the back-end of the AP really).
Flagging to move to the Kingmaker AP sub board, so that you get the best answers and help.
Every time you move something to a sub board you limit the number of people who are going to see it and thus limit the help the post can receive.
That said when I have played and run Kingmaker I have always run into a similar problem to yours with XP. There are two really good ways to fix this either A ditch individual XP and simply do a group party XP (IE treat everything as a 4 person party and just keep 1 XP total for everyone) or increase all encounters and XP gain to compensate for each player over 4. This requires a lot more work on the GM's end but it really dose result in the most balanced game play.
One last thing, I do not know how far you are in the story but I for one always have a hard time getting my players to stay invested in the story after a certain point in the second book. If this becomes a problem for you, or if you just feel the players are too comfortable / not interested add add a rival kingdom with a rival adventuring party as its rulers. I like to make it as close to a mirror image of my parties kingdom as I can. Including having the opposite kingdom alignment and anti-Paladin if the party has a Paladin.
Side not: adding something like this is also a great way to play XP catch up with random side quests and encounters involving this other group.