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For the purposes of this poll 'chivalrous' means they at least try to live up to the stereotypical knightly virtues (with varying degrees of success): courage, honor, courtesy, justice, and a readiness to help the weak.

Explain your choice if you have the time.

I like Knights, and frankly, playing villains is easy.  So I have at least one a campaign, if there's no actually knightly orders in it, more if there are full on castles and stuff.

I love knights, but I tend to tilt the camera a bit because a perfectly chivalrous knight in shining armor is somewhat limited in their potential narrative application.

So, I've got a few I roll out as NPCs from time to time.

Sir Parzavel, an older knight with long and tangled red hair and beard shot with white, battered and rusty harness, a notched sword with a makeshift grip wrapped with waxed twine, and a ill tempered nag of a misshapen horse.  He's the greatest paladin in the, world of course, fearless, noble, and utterly unaffected by greed or pride.  He's a great way to slip a ringer into a party, it's funny how rarely they expect anything from him.  One of my favorite stories about him is the time the party was fleeing from a greater demon, and he looked at the young knight in the party with a gleam in his eye as he turned to hold the way, "well kid, are you coming or not?"  

The Baron of Bastion is a loyal retainer of the local evil king.  He is himself a kindly lord who eats only fruit, vegetables, course bread, and gruel at feasts.  In his defense he claims to have lost three stone since he went off rich food.  In reality he refuses to eat better than the least of his vassals.  He is a gracious host, a just and kindly lord, and utterly loyal to the oaths he swore to the evil king.  While he is getting on in years and not a particularly mighty warrior, his men are fiercely loyal and very well trained.

Lord Brenner of Brenner manor is a former paladin of the gods of light.  He now dabbles in the dark arts and seeks alliances with their enemies.  He is fond of his dogs and has as little to do with his vassals as possible.  His chamberlain handles his domain competently and fairly while trying desperately to turn aside the eyes of the church and neighbouring nobles.  Brenner is not so much an evil man as a man who has rejected the gods and seeks their downfall on ethical bounds but as his search for the power to withstand them draws him deeper and deeper into the darkness problems are sure to arise.

Black Dannor is a robber knight who waylays passersby for ransom and loot.  He sees himself as a valiant rebel fighting against the evil empire.  And often speaks courteously to those he robs and imprisons without cause.  For all that he his no coward and no fool.  Nor will he fight for a dishonorable lord or be forced to surrender to such.  He is a top notch fighter and his men are well trained dirty fighters.  His depredations are well within his rights by some interpretations of the local laws.

It's pretty damn rare. Sure, I'll have the occasional NPC who tries to live up to virtues like that, but they're as likely, if not more so, to be a shopkeeper, tradesman, noble, or something else entirely as they are to be some kind of professional combatant.

I voted 'often' in that there seem to be some in every campaign.
My Karameikos 'Palaces & Princesses' game is full of them, from the Grand Duke down. A couple are the Duke's Herald Sir Jonathan 'Old Ironbones' Tendoros, and Sir Gabrionus, the Baron Vorloi - father of the PC Knight Lady Alexandra Vorloi.
My Curse of the Crimson Throne game had the Hellknight Sir Jereth Rogare.
My Wilderlands game has the Paladin Malenn of Mitra.
My Loudwater FR game has a bunch of local knights, and the knights of Elturgard, notably Princess Shaedra Kyatt.

My recently ended 5e + Harn game featured two knights stolen straight out of the Trollbridge scenario. I played them as honorable and strong with chivalry, honor and a touch of pomp and they served as an effective front-line for the melee-shy PCs.

One was quasi-promised to one of the female PCs who was the daughter of a baron. Her father could not tame her so allowed her to "go on an adventure" to the east marches with his considerable entourage.

Well, it ended up being an actual adventure. :-) She gradually warmed up to him but her predilections and membership in the Lia Kavair (thieve's guild) was pulling her in a more... independent direction.

He never besmirched her honor and treated her as the princess he hoped she would someday be.

In the future I think I will avoid scenarios that have NPCs in charge. I could NOT get rid of these damn knights, the PCs kept healing 'em and saving 'em and the knights returned in kind. There literally was no threat to these adventurers as the knights handled combats decisively especially with the support of two thieves, a mage, and a priest in the wings supporting them.

Knights. Can't live with 'em - can't kill 'em.

Seems to come up fairly regularly with players and NPCs and as a DM I use them for some campaigns.

Quite a bit (I chose 'often') because of my campaigns, almost all have involved social intrigue/roleplaying in a courtly milieu to some extent (and the current game I'm running is about 50% politics in a fairly standard Medieval Fantasy Realm).  Generally I don't like the simplistic portrayal of nobility or other powerful people as simply corrupt/nepotistic/tyrannical and lording it over an oppressed peasantry.  I try to portray knights and lords as people with a diverse range of personalities, some venal and others earnestly trying to live up to the ideals of their society.  Generally they're a mixed bag---for example in my longest-running game the main society was mostly an adaption of ancient Rome so there wasn't exactly a cultural equivalent to the 'Knight in Shining Armor,' but there was a group of famous heroes and while most of them were kinda hams used to the adulation of the masses they genuinely tried to protect people and do good.  In the current game, which is a solo campaign, my friend is playing a Knight Banneret which is basically like junior-tier nobility and he has a rivalry with this other guy who technically has the same rank but who's father is part of the peerage and looks down his nose at those bootstrapping themselves into the court from the lower gentry.  Yet that guy is a war hero who deserves his acclaim and tries to uphold the ideals of chivalry, he's just kind of an asshole in some ways. (Also he's technically a Rogue/Fighter just because I wanted to give him a distinctive fighting style).

We don't play fantasy inspired by the medieval era, so pretty much never.

Quite often.  A large part of my campaign is set in the elven empire, where "errantry" is a common thing among the young -- more or less the ideal of Arthurian knight-errantry, where you head out under a pseudonym with only what you can carry on your back to Do Good and Right Wrongs.  The concept runs throughout the culture, if sometimes more in the breach than in the observance.

I don't do a lot of campaigns where knights are common. When I run games with Knights, they tend to be on the gritty side.

I am running a wuxia campaign right now, and the heroes in that genre are sometimes translated as Knight Errants because there is a code of honor at work (though it is a bit of stretch to compare the two---they are not tied to lords like knights, though they may be tied to a sect, teacher, etc). In these campaigns, the codes are important to most of the NPC martial heroes they meet but rarely do the players meet one who lives up to every ideal. They are more likely to encounter someone who lives up to one or two of the ideals but seriously falls short or radically reinterprets one of the others. But that is also because bad guys are often more prominent in the campaign.

Many times, but it's certainly not the majority, so I put "rarely". I and the people I've played with almost always invent our own cultures, and the European chivalric ideal appears sometimes, but not always, and even when it's there, there tend to be far more knights who don't live that way.

I'd say they were very frequent if you meant to include warriors who follow their honor code, as we have far more of those who aren't chivalric per se. Samurai who respect bushido, Wood Wardens who protect the forests, Knights of Tniotkea who follow the Blue Code, etc.

In Warhammer, absolutely yes. In a land of corruption, chivalry and honor is rebellion against the status quo.

In my OD&D, rarely if ever.

Kinda the same here. On BX knights were few and far between. But in AD&D they popped up fairly regularly.

Depends where we are on the "break conventions"/"nothing wrong with stereotypical" pendulum, and also whether we're in typical medieval Europe.

There was a genuine knight in our Border Princes WFRP2e game - a Brettonian exile who was a right bastard. Several nobles in the place itself who might qualify as knights if it were rich and developed enough - but again nasty pieces of work almost to a man. This is the place where the favoured method of political assassination is by poison.

If the setting calls for it, I'll almost always have a few NPC's that exemplify it. And I'll have a LOT of NPC's striving to meet that bar, but most NPC's will not understand the concepts of chivalry and honor (though they might think they do) enough to live up to it.

So most of the time it ends up looking very GoT.

I see a lot of people who have 'Knights' in name, but very few who are the romantic ideal of chivalrous...

Which is pretty much historically accurate.

Quote from: David Johansen;862335Which is pretty much historically accurate.

But not what the title of the post was asking.

Often. But rarely straight.

Usually as figures of self parody and quixotic comedy relief. A favorite recurring NPC was a dude named Sir Bruts Sans Pitie, who had the stereotypical, outrageous french accent. Simple, but the players loved him, and he was a decent if foolhardy fighter, so he stuck around.

Now I have plenty of non-chivalrous knights, because knights are a common enough elite martial/social class and chivalry is a particular code of cultural behavior that does not apply to most of them. There's a wide range of types as one could imagine.

You know, I've never had a player who wanted to play a romantic-style knight.

Quote from: saskganesh;862339A favorite recurring NPC was a dude named Sir Bruts Sans Pitie, who had the stereotypical, outrageous french accent.

I approve of this name. :D

Quote from: Shipyard Locked;862416I approve of this name. :D

And his accent.

Quote from: Shipyard Locked;862416I approve of this name. :D

Total rip from Tom Mallory. Except there, he was a bad guy.

For most campaigns I've played or DMed, a knight was just another guy bearing arms: the outcome of the encounter depended on who did what to whom, and PCs wouldn't hesitate to attack a knight who tried to coerce them, for example. That changed quite a bit when the Cavalier class was introduced, along with intrigue among the upper classes. Suddenly, "If he's being a dick I'll kill him and take his stuff!" wasn't the preferred option.

Dark Albion (http://www.dcrouzet.net/heroes-witchery/?page_id=206) is not a chivalrous world, not anymore certainly (if it ever was); on the contrary it is a world where the ideals of knighthood are profoundly tried by civil war and corruption.  But there's ample room for player characters to play Knights who still hold to the theoretical ideals of a pious and/or chivalrous knight.

In the two original campaigns of Dark Albion there were at least a couple of characters who tried to do this.  One ended up dead, the other became at least somewhat compromised by his family's scheming.  It was fascinating.

Of course, the Dark Albion book itself makes mention of Mallory, who was a knight during the Rose War, and the circumstances of who he served, and how he died, and how all of that directly influenced his Morte D'Arthur. I really think it was in some way a commentary on the horrors of the time in which he lived.

Literal knights in shining armour, I have those when the setting calls for it:).
People that try to live up to some sort of knightly ideals, pretty often. Some of them succeed, some fail, and some succeed in a way that's more disturbing than the failures, but there tend to be people you'd like to be friends with in pretty much every campaign;).