I want to start an honor mode playthrough focusing only on three companions for story-emersion.

I noticed the camp gets too crowded, even from the very beginning, if you keep all companions and that results in too many interactions that you have to do to progress forward.
They all have their personal quests and events that stack up in a backlog and if you want to move their stories forward, you have to constantly long rest a lot of times in a row just for that.
Then you have to swap them around just to do their personal quests very often, which I feel waters down the overall experience.

  • My main question is, how do you guys handle the extra companions at camp?
  • Does it matter or affect the main story if you keep the extra companions in your camp idle and ignore them completely?
  • Is it better to dismiss all the extras from the camp instead?
  • Apparently some events proc automatically even if you ignore the companions. (Ex. Astarion's first camp event).
    (bite event)
    Does this happen often for passive camp companions?