K: Knights and the lack thereof.

My campaigns have always had a curious deficit of the knightly persuasion. Not only has there never been any PC of the paladin-ish type, there has never been any characters remotely resembling a knightly or even vaguely chivalric ideal in my games.

... No, I lie. The party leader of my longest-running campaign was a remarkably honourable and almost knightly fellow, when I stop to think about it; rather an impressive feat, seeing as the gentleman in question was a thief. (he would be the unfortunate soul who was dressed in the fighter-mage's gown at the temple-warming party.)

Nonetheless -- and this is despite a fair few games having all the themes and trappings and even with some players being disappointed without them -- no one has ever actually played the archetype. Or even make small noises towards considering the idea.

Now, I myself am quite partial to paladins if not to all of the sometimes very culturally-specific trappings of the stereotypical knightly behaviour; many of the characters I enjoying reading about, making wander about in a video game or that I've written arguably have "lawful (good)" traits or would fall right in the middle. But I haven't played a paladin either, in the rare few times I've managed to be a player ... Frustratinglyamusingly enough, a goodly chunk of the reason is that the DMs in question have essentially discouraged it. They'd all fallen into the "paladin = lawful stupid arsehole" trap and there was likely no convincing them otherwise.

But in hindsight, I do find it likely that if I had tried to run a character along those lines I would have been disappointed -- the archetype, unless juggled veeeery~ carefully, doesn't really lend itself well to the behaviour of the "typical" adventuring party. And bending the intentions and fun of my fellow players as a group just so I could have my shining knight, frankly, just wouldn't have been very knightly.