The eponymous gaming group. The Knights were first formed when the players were still young, and the charter has a long storied history. The original Gamemaster was Brian who at one point was running sessions for different sub-chapters of the group every night of the week (typically the same adventure but tweaked for each different group) until Brian suffered a nervous breakdown and handed the game over to Weird Pete.
Eventually, Pete left and B.A. took over and after a couple of subsequent player rotations, the group ended up where it is today. The first comic strips are set shortly after Dave joins the group and Johnny Kizinski quits - so the first strips depict B.A., Bob, Dave and Brian. Sara joined up shortly afterward, giving the group the line-up which it has had through most of the comic's history.
The Knights are a respected "name level" gaming group in Muncie and regularly compete in tournaments with the larger Muncie gaming community. Like most of the other groups, they are very passionate about their game and take it seriously, having among them some of the area's best players.
- Ax-Crazy: Their characters tend to be this due to their hair trigger tempers and pursuit of exp as well as loot.
- Berserk Button: They're all prone to temper but when the players are pissed off with B.A., they tend to tie him up, blindfold him and suspend him upside down above the table for Colonel Prowler to torment. He still generally thinks whatever he did to deserve it was worth the consequences.
- The Knights have been known to routinely put each other in the hospital over in-game infractions, and even Sara has been known to punch out other members of the group if they go too far. If somebody who isn't a member of the Knights tries to throw down or actually hurts a member of the team, however, God help him.
- Chronic Backstabbing Disorder: The Knights are each other's own worst enemies with Bob and Brian the worst of it. Ironically, Sarah does quite a bit of siding with NPCs over her own team as well.
- Flat Character: In the early installments. Each of the original Knights was whatever the strip called for, but once the series shifted from single episode strips to ongoing story arcs, the Knights each took on their familiar personalities.
- Hero with Bad Publicity: The in-universe Untouchable Trio + One is almost universally reviled in BA's games because of their actions.
- If You Die, I Call Your Stuff: Unless there's a protege to pass the stuff on to, which is the usual assumption.
- Moral Myopia: The Knights believe their characters are great heroes but they're usually up to no good, general lawlessness, and indiscriminate murder.
- Properly Paranoid: The Knights believe every NPC and plot hook by BA is an attempt to screw them. The irony is they're not often wrong but because he's so sick of them acting this way.
- Only Sane Man: BA Felton and Sarah are usually treated as this but both have their own quirks.
- Serious Business: The root of a lot of the comedy. Having the game every week is serious business. Dice are serious business. In-game revenge is serious business... and so on.
- Slapstick: Obviously the violence at the game table is comically over the top. Although the creator has claimed he's had such fights at his table.
- True Companions: They have each others' backs even at the worst of times.
The current Gamemaster and host. B.A. is a timid individual who still lives with his mother and works as an assistant manager at a local Pizza chain. Nearly all his spare time is spent crafting the "perfect" adventure, which proves an act in futility early in the series run but got better when he grew a backbone and adapted to the habits of his players. While readers are quick to pick up on the players' tendency to derail the game with Hack and Slash, they're slow to notice that B.A. often encourages it. In his campaign, sometimes the old man begging for coins really is a 10th level monk able to summon an army of beggars.
His most notorious NPCs are Red Gurdy Pickens, a rough and tumble antagonist who just won't die and whom B.A. likes to pull out on occasion to rattle the Knights, and Jonid Coincrawler, a trickster gnome with a track record of bilking the Knights out of their loot.
- Beware the Nice Ones: BA is typically very timid but still can show a mean streak in game and has occasional moments of brilliance.
- Butt-Monkey: B.A.'s initial relationship with his group was about one step away from battered spouse syndrome. Even in more recent years, a large proportion of the story arcs end with him staring dumbstruck, destroying the campaign himself, or re-tooling his entire story in a desperate effort to save it. Quite often, this leads to accusations of railroading.
- Cannot Talk to Women: This really shows when he’s having dinner with Patty. Amusingly, he’s fine as long as they’re talking about something game-related.
- Honest Rolls Character: A gnome named Tar Markvar, one of B.A.'s last and most fondly remembered (by him) player characters from before he took over the game.
- Railroading: Has occasionally been guilty of this but gets accused of it far more often than its actually true. In one egregious example, the heroes were forcibly teleported to a castle, given a quest, and then teleported to the start point before they could engage in disruptive behavior in the castle. They then had to follow the only path in an otherwise impenetrable forest to the dungeon.
- Although It Makes Sense in Context - the last few times B.A. had started his adventures with the heroes receiving a mission directly from a king, their immediate response was to attack the king and take all his stuff. After the fifth or sixth adventure crashed and burned during the prologue, B.A. resorted to the method described above. Astoundingly, the lesson seems to have sunk in.
Described in his character bios as the first "dues paying" member of the Knights, Bob is a hardcore dedicated hack and slash gamer known for his quick temper and relentless dedication to the game (and considering that gaming is already Serious Business in Muncie, that's saying something). While his in game Catchphrase is "I waste 'em with my crossbow," his out-of-game motto is "the game must go on." Throughout the series, Bob has told every lie, shirked every responsibility and pulled every trick he can think of to escape any responsibilities and/or entanglements keeping him away from the game table.
This has estranged him more than once from his father and cost him a respectable job as a claims adjuster. He currently works at Weird Pete's game shop, where he gets paid strictly in game product, which he barters with for some basic necessities (read: more game product), but it's his girlfriend Sheila Horowitz who holds down an actual paying job and pays their bills. He tends to prefer playing dwarven thieves wielding crossbows, his best-known being a family line all named Knuckles.
- Berserk Button: Don't touch his dice.
- Character Development: The most of the Knights has Bob move out of his father's home, get a steady job, get a steady girlfriend (Sheila), and more or less become a responsible adult with only a few regressions.
- Drunk Rolling: During Brian's Cattle Punk campaign, Bob's character has his boots stolen by a local outlaw. Bob then becomes obsessed with stealing a pair of boots off a drunk sleeping in the livery stable. He runs into all kinds of problems and this act will keep coming back to haunt him over the course of the campaign.
- Jerkass: Not to the extent of Stevil, but still there.
- Manchild: All the Knights have their childish moments, but Bob's got it by far the worst — he's impulsive, irresponsible and is so terrible at managing his life that he needs someone to do it for him, which he combines with an utter self-centered nature and a Never My Fault attitude as he refuses to take responsibility for anything and throws tantrums if he doesn't get his way. Patty once told him that he was more difficult than some of her kindergarten students. As the comic goes on, part of his Character Development is overcoming this.
- Playing Sick: Bob often resorted to this tactic to avoid his job responsibilities. His irresponsible attitude eventually cost him his job and got him kicked out by his father.
- Random Number God: If such a deity existed, Bob would be its high priest in Muncie. More than the others, he carefully tracks his dice and has names and personalities assigned to them.
- The Slacker: Blows off any and all responsibilities that interfere with gaming.
- Stay in the Kitchen: Seemed to be his attitude towards Sara early on, now inverted living with Sheila. Because she brings home the real paycheck, their home scenes usually show her reading a newspaper in a recliner and him in an apron.
- The Real Man: Somewhat the way Bob plays all his characters. When playing a dwarven thief, he wields a crossbow and tends to keep on hand a collection of specialized magic bolts for different occasions and he brooks no insult to his honor often to his detriment.
- Younger Than They Look: Bob is only 26 but due to being balding and always wearing glasses he can easily be mistaken for ten or even twenty years older.
Former Gamemaster turned player, Brian is a painfully shy recluse away from the gaming table. He lives partly on an inheritance from his uncle and his dead parents' life insurance policy and partly on revenues from miniatures painting, PC repairs, eBay trading, and extreme frugality. At the table, he's a savant. He has near perfect memory of all rules and revisions to the game, and is a master of advanced gaming tactics.
Brian is able to pull off brilliant maneuvers at the game table and is the single most likely player to turn B.A.'s adventures to his personal advantage (though the other Knights have gotten wise to it). Brian has shown signs at different times of being slightly unhinged, from having an imaginary girlfriend to doing his adventure prep with dolls. He usually plays Dwarven wizards from the Lotus clan, the most well known being nicknamed "Teflon Billy."
- Berserk Button: Don't mention his imaginary girlfriend. In this and other instances he has been prone to flipping the table though more recently the Knights have called him out on it and apparently he's had to go to anger management counseling offscreen.
- Big Eater: For instance, he caused the group to lose its refrigerator privileges at B.A.'s house by eating a casserole that was meant to feed a dozen people at an upcoming family reunion.
- Cannot Talk to Women / Cannot Spit It Out: So badly that even B.A. pities him. Brian is terrible at talking to women about anything not game-related, to the point where Sheila gets revenge on him by locking him in a room with Felicia Day.
- The Chessmaster: Oh, so much.
- Crazy-Prepared: Both in and out of game. For example, he swallows a ring of teleportation every morning and has copies of his most essential spells tattooed on the backs of his teammates. Out of game, in order to be prepared for the possibility of one of his characters acquiring a wish, he hired a paralegal to help him draft an ironclad multipage wish containing clauses and precise wording to account for any way a Jerkass Genie might try to screw him over. In the end, B.A. and an entire team of his fellow Gamemasters couldn't find a loophole to deny him his wish but his new immortal status made it legal for a deity he'd pissed off to destroy him. Even then a clause in the wish undid all of the consequences of the wish and gave him a 25,000 gold piece consolation prize.
- Crippling Overspecialization: Brian knows how to play wizards. Brian really knows how to play wizards. When the group started a campaign where everyone had to go outside their comfort zone and he wound up playing a fighter, he loaded the character up with proficiency with siege weapons like catapults and ballistas (which the party had no access to) in an attempt to emulate the normal long-ranged devastation he normally could inflict as a wizard, but neglected to take even rudimentary skill with any melee weapons.
- The Dreaded: He has earned quite a reputation in the gaming community.
- Explosive Stupidity: When something angers him in-game, he has an extreme tendency to fireball first and check things like "is the room we're in large enough to contain a fireball without hitting the party" or "are we on the third floor of a building made entirely of wood" later. This has led to a few total party kills.
- Girlfriend in Canada: As noted above, challenging him on this point is his Berserk Button, so the other Knights avoid mentioning the issue unless one of them is being particularly stupid.
- He's actually got two of them. There's a Christmas strip where the Knights are discussing their holiday plans, and Brian insists that he'll be spending Christmas with his uncle, out of town. At the end of the strip, we see his actual holiday plans: he's alone at his house, eating popcorn and watching a James Bond marathon on basic cable.
- Greed: This, above everything, is Brian's Fatal Flaw. Whenever his plans fail, it's almost always because he couldn't leave well enough alone and wanted to grab a bigger piece of the pie.
- Jerkass: Played with. In general, away from the table, Brian is endearingly loyal to his gaming buddies, unless of course we're talking about Prowler. In-game he is essentially a Jerk with a Heart of Jerk played for comedy.
- Never My Fault: While he doesn't throw tantrums about it the way Bob might, Brian is quick to blame everyone else when something goes wrong, even if it's blatantly obvious that it's all his fault. He's always ready to employ his Rules Lawyer nature to device speeches on why he's completely blameless and it's everyone else who's being unreasonable.
- Pet the Dog: Even in game, his characters show lots of sympathy to animals. B.A. even exploited this with Hannibal the violent pack ape.
- Remembered Too Late: Brian is sometimes prone to this. For example, one his plans to win a Car Wars style game culminated in him ejecting from his vehicle and flying away on a collapsible hang glider as his vehicle exploded in an enormous fireball, relying on his fireproof suit to keep him safe. One of the other players then pointed out that while his suit was fireproof, the hang glider wasn't. Cue Brian's character plummeting into the ground.
- Rules Lawyer: One of the clearest examples in fiction, and notable as one of the few examples where it works both ways. He will use every legal loophole he can find, but if he's shown evidence the rules speak against him, or a higher gaming authority brings the hammer on him, he will abide by them with (usually) little grumbling.
- Shrinking Violet: If not with his friends and away from game, he withdraws completely into himself.
- The Scrooge: One could say he is Min-Maxing his finances.
- The Stoic: B.A. notes that Brian is a very difficult person to read, seeming largely impassive except for a harsh belly-laugh when he throws a fireball at a target he knows he can crush, when he Mood Whiplashes into a Table Flipping rage, or incoherent blubbering when he has to talk to a girl outside a gaming context.
- Too Clever by Half: Usually when Brian's plans fail, it's because of this and his ever-present Greed. He tries to squeeze every advantage out of a situation and will eventually forget an obscure rule or variable (or leave his friends out.)
- Xanatos Gambit: Has one for every situation imaginable. He also seems to live by the creed that if the party cannot win, Lotus WILL at least gain some benefits from their defeat.
An accomplished roleplayer even before joining the Knights, Sara was invited to the table because she is B.A.'s cousin. This, and the fact that she's, well, a woman made her a hard sell at the Knights table. It didn't help that when they wanted to slaughter Orcs, she wanted to parley with them. After a lot of conflict in the early strips, Sara has grown to accept the group and they in turn accepted her.
- Berserk Button: Sexist remarks and unwanted flirting will quickly earn you a threatening shirt grab and, if you don't learn your lesson, a black eye.
- Closer to Earth: At least until other characters were introduced. She was the straight woman to the idiocy of the male players.
- Cross Playing: She forced this on the Knights early in the series leading to the creation of a monster in the form of Boberella. She also chose to play a male character when B.A. pushed the group to create new ones outside
their usual race/class template. - Friend to All Children: Sara always seems to get on pretty well with children (like the Pee Wee Hack Master League). Except for the two 13-year olds at Gary Con, that is.
- Not So Above It All: Even Sara takes dice superstitions seriously. As you'll see from the entry for Random Number God on the main page, she's probably wise to do so. She's also occasionally been known to turn "evil" (i.e. against the group) to dole out righteous retribution against the other Knights, once or twice becoming the antagonist for a story arc. She's often visibly amused when one of the other characters suffers the consequences of their actions.
- The Roleplayer: To the point of occasionally being Ms. "Stop Having Fun" Guys in the earlier strips, but these days she tends to just create characters who's natural inclinations fit better with her adventuring party, as most good roleplayers do.
- The Smurfette Principle: The only woman at the table. Although she's far more compassionate toward NPCs than the doofuses at her table, Sara herself has been known to show a mean streak.
The naïve newcomer of the group though only the second newest member of the group behind Sara. Dave was brought in by Bob back in their college days and immediately took to playing fighters with the biggest swords he can get his hands on. Typically the Ditz, Dave has his moments of brilliance and the writers have explained that he's actually not that dumb, he's just really laid back. Dave's iconic character is a fighter named El Ravager with a Hackmaster +12 sword.
- Bad Liar: He has no poker face whatsoever. This actually becomes a plot point when Bob and Dave want to conceal their in-game plans from Brian and Sara - Dave actually has to wear a paper bag on his head so they can't glean anything from his expression.
- BFS: His Hack Master +12, of course. When introduced to the game in ages past, Dave's very first comment was "I want a big-ass sword!".
- Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass: He’s admittedly an idiot, but when he committed fully to running a magic-user (and started paying Brian for lessons), he started learning frighteningly fast. He also shows shades of this when running a straight fighter – say what you will, he knows how to kick ass.
- The Ditz: While he has his moments, as mentioned above, nobody can deny that Dave ain't too bright. Occasionally he dips into a Cloudcuckoolander set of mind, but mostly he's just clueless.
- Hidden Depths: Though generally not much of a thinker, and very often downright dense, Dave can occasionally surprise everyone with some quick-witted moments that ends up turning defeat to victory.
- The Real Man: Dave is frequently Bob's partner-in-crime in this department.
- Speaks Fluent Animal: Dave can understand Squirrely. Of course, Squirrely is unusually intelligent but he doesn't speak english.
- Unfazed Everyman: Of all of the Knights, Dave is the one with the least baggage and has the most interests that don't relate directly back to role-playing games. He can be just as nuts as Bob at times, but has also been seen watching basketball and having normal relationships with his family.
Ex-Knights
Johnny Kizinski
A Knight of the Dinner Table who left before the strips began, and has turned up a couple of times to sit in on a few games. The Knights are fond of saying "the man could play" but one day his luck ran out and he left the gaming scene. He moved away, got married, has children and runs a Big Juices. A shameless flirt and an opportunist, his overall mentality highlights how the Knights acted before Sara joined.
- Born Lucky: Until the Noodle Incident when his dice turned on him.
- Casanova Wannabe: He also hits on every female gamer he meets with poor results. And he's married.
- Fallen Hero: This was the attitude B.A, Bob, Dave and Brian all had toward him before his return to gaming.
- Hilariously Abusive Childhood: Constantly smokes right above his baby, as in when they're strapped to his chest.
- Major Injury Underreaction: Johnny loses his foot to diabetes and is ecstatic that he can game full time due to being on disability.
