Extra 5e characters

[Saint Jimmy]

I am going to be DMing a 5e game for a group of people totaling five, but as far as I can tell the MM only talks about four person parties and the DMG doesn't seem to talk about it, as far as I can tell. Any help?

[Foxhound438]

there's a table in the DMG under "creating an encounter" that's something to the effect of EXP threshold per character at each level, basically you take the exp threshold for each character and add them all together, then when picking monsters have a total xp value around the total you got earlier. It even has difficulty levels for each, so you can design encounters to be harder or easier, depending on what you want.

[Saint Jimmy]

Yeah I thought that should be it, but I couldn't find stuff about creating encounters. I'll go look again though. Thanks!

EDIT: okay, yeah. I found it. Thanks!

[Knaight]

there's a table in the DMG under "creating an encounter" that's something to the effect of EXP threshold per character at each level, basically you take the exp threshold for each character and add them all together, then when picking monsters have a total xp value around the total you got earlier. It even has difficulty levels for each, so you can design encounters to be harder or easier, depending on what you want.

There's also a multiplier for how outnumbered they are. It's a really key multiplier and needs to be remembered; ignoring it tends to produce single monsters that get utterly trounced when you expect them to put up a fight and freakishly dangerous hordes even when they weren't supposed to be that dangerous. Alternately, eyeball it.