Role-playing games are full of scoundrels, indeed you might say that a penchant for skullduggery and bad behaviour is embedded in the hobby’s DNA. From the start Dungeons & Dragons took inspiration from some of fantasy fiction’s most famous thieves, the likes of Conan, Fahfrd and Bilbo Baggins. And with games often structured around finding a big score and then spending your loot on better equipment to pull off even bigger scores, there was always space in a party for a class that specialized in disabling traps and bypassing security systems.
Even as D&D shifted away from desperate action to high fantasy adventure, infiltrating evil lairs and pulling off audacious heists have remained an important part of the game and consequently its love of roguish behaviour soon spread to both other games and other genres.
Take a trip into space you’re more likely following in the footsteps of Han Solo or Firefly’s Malcolm Reynolds than Captain Kirk or Flash Gordon. When urban fantasy flourished in the 1990s it was because of a game where players wrestled with monstrous desires that pushed against their flickering humanity. Cyberpunk games focused on slick techno-thriller heists, sometimes cut with magic but always stocked with betrayal. And as modern games have focused on emulating fiction, the subject matter more often than not remained about people trying to steal good lives for themselves, whether that’s in a gritty steampunk city or a chicken shack in Texas.
When gallant knights do enter the equation in these games, they are often set apart as outsiders. They’ll often have strict codes of honour they must adhere to or risk losing access to whatever powers and abilities make them unique and, more importantly, useful members of a party. In the best games, this can cause some interesting discussions about morality and power that make players think about how these forces often clash in real life. At the worst, they inspire memes where the paladin gets locked in a closet like an overbearing teacher while the kids run wild in the school corridors.
It’s that internal conflict, however, that makes knights so fascinating in a role-playing game. Playing a character that follows a rigid code of honor offers great storytelling opportunities alongside hard choices. It’s not so easy to do the right thing when doing so diverges from what’s expected and comes with a personal cost, even when those rules were created by a force of good in the world.
