How Do You Guys Handle The Round Table?

[mj6373]

I guess I'm just curious how y'all deal with the fact that a bunch of the Round Table Knights are lords, sometimes even kings. There's just this constant awkward tension of which thing they have to be distant from to focus on the other thing. Either you've got a purely theoretical Round Table filled with knights who are rarely questing or advising Arthur because they've got their own lands to attend to when not mustered for war, or you've got a bunch of really present and active Knights giving us the glamor shots of everybody sitting at the Round Table discussing stuff with the King, but then you've gotta assume they're pretty disinterested in their leadership duties and have pawned them off on paid administrators or family members or the like, which makes them seem like a somewhat irresponsible lot.

 

In my campaign I basically decided to replace scutage with the opposite, because I don't think scutage is a very honorable concept for an exalted warrior class, so basically I flipped the concept so during peacetime the serfs pay their lord a questing fund to get him to go journeying, during which time they more or less govern themselves. But that's obviously abnormal, I just thought it was a fun way of exemplifying Arthur's kindness to commoners and love of questing.

Edited February 13, 2023 by mj6373

[Uqbarian]

I haven't got there, but my guess is there'd be a mix of attitudes. Probably most lords are going to treat their estate as their primary responsibility, with their RTKship as more of an honorary thing. (The GPC notes that a knight's life doesn't need to change all that much if he's appointed to the Round Table -- he has more prestige but no actual duties.) Some lords might be keen on being at Camelot or out questing all the time, and others might indeed see them as somewhat irresponsible (cf. Pellinore).

Even the eager Table-staying/questing lords, though, are probably going to have someone in their family running their estates or kingdoms in their stead. Those situations can give hooks for intrigue and adventure, of course. (And it'd be handy to have a bunch of these in the later periods as situations that Mordred can exploit, both to work his allies into positions of authority and to criticise the Round Table as an institution.)