In Which I Ramble about my Pendragon RPG to Pathfinder 1e Conversion

[Baelon]

Preamble Ramble:

So, I've been DMing for about ten years now. Started with the d20 Star Wars RPG (the one before Saga Edition) and went, from there, to 3.5 and then, finally to Pathfinder 1e. My friends and I have played outside of that progression some, but we kinda default to Pathfinder 1e.

But before I ever played DnD whatsoever, I was a big mark for King Arthur. Excalibur and, like, Dragonheart are the movies that convinced kid-me to like medieval fantasy in the first place. So when I found out there was a whole King Arthur tabletop RPG, I was like, "Oh, man, I gotta get me some of that!" And it looked super cool! The Great Pendragon Campaign was this unique, awesome source book that covered all this material and I really, really wanted to run it for my group!

But, well, see again that first paragraph. We play Pathfinder. That's our thing. And, to be honest, I know that system fairly well, I have an understanding of it, I can DM it to--at least THEIR satisfaction--with very little actual prep. But, I still always really thought, "Man, I'd love to play or run Pendragon."

So we've been in-between major campaigns for a bit now, mostly using our together-time for video games and movie nights. Still, for years, Pendragon had been in the back of my mind. Well, one day I got the urge to look and see if there were any Pendragon videos on YouTube. I found one that was pretty fun to listen to and it got me thinking. I read a bit in the Great Pendragon Campaign sourcebook, read some of the Pendragon 5e core book and I said to myself, "I think I can run this."

So I sat down and I started figuring out how to, y'know. Do that.


Round Peg, Square Hole:

So anybody who knows Pendragon and DnD knows that these are very different types of game. DnD is a combat simulator dressed like a roleplaying game, Pendragon is this very...I dunno, narratively driven dice game that shifts between Crusader Kings and Mount & Blade with romance and stuff sprinkled in. One is based on pulp fantasy, one is based on classical romance literature. One is very, very focused in on the short careers of a single group of dubiously-heroic heroes, the other is a sweeping epic that covers eighty years of history featuring multiple generations of PCs.

And I wanted all of it.

I wanted my players to go on daring adventures, plan out dynasties, and fight Saxons in pitched battles. I wanted them to age and die and play on as their children. I wanted them to win titles and land and risk it all. And I wanted them to play the entirety of Arthurian mythology, explicitly as background characters who would show up in a couple of scenes of a movie, going completely unnamed until you get to the credits and you're like, "Wait, Sir Caradoc? Who the heck is Caradoc?"

Doing that meant a lot of homebrewing. I had to incorporate systems that were entirely alien to DnD, change the flow of time relative to how a campaign unfolds. But I also had to gut Pendragon. A lot of really cool, core systems from that game just wouldn't work in DnD.

I'll assume you know how DnD works from a narrative standpoint, but I'll briefly explain a Pendragon year and touch on a few of its more interesting systems.

So in Pendragon, the year is broken up into three parts, basically. You've got your Easter Feast (mostly an RPing section where you hobnob with important NPCs and learn what's going on in the world), your Adventuring Phase in the summer (when battles are fought, quests are undertaken, and all that good stuff happens), and then your Winter Phase (where the players tend to their manors, find out which family members lived/died, get married, have kids, and basically otherwise fill out the rest of the year).

Really cool stuff that I think makes a lot more sense than having adventurers who are just *always* fighting or getting into shenanigans. Not that there's not a place for that, it just seems like that lifestyle would be really, really short. So this was something I definitely wanted to keep, this pace and this general breakdown of the year. That seemed like a core component of getting through this epic, eighty year campaign.

Pendragon also has a really neat feature of Traits and Passions which can compel characters to behave in certain ways under certain circumstances. For instance, maybe your knight really likes to drink so he has to roll the Indulgence or Temperate Trait to get super drunk at feasts or to avoid it of whatever. Maybe he has a Hate (Saxons) Passion so he'll have to make a roll to avoid going into a bloodthirsty rage when he's in the same room as a Saxon.

It's really interesting stuff and it can make it feels almost like a tug-of-war between the character and the player as the character seems to try to do things that the player wouldn't necessarily want, but, man, it can make for cool stories! But it's also something that goes against a lot of the core philosophy of DnD and how DnD encourages players to interact with the game. And my players would, for sure, chafe at this infringement on their agency. But it's core to how Pendragon, as a game, functions.

So, take out the heart, but leave the shell and you get


Pathfinder Dressed as Pendragon:

Heresy. I know. Adapting a whole RPG system into, basically, a setting. But this is probably my one chance to run this big King Arthur campaign so I'm doing it. Besides, a pulp fantasy King Arthur sounds kinda super fun?

So what does this look like? Well, there are a lot of tables and systems that I can go into, stuff I either made from wholecloth or stuff that I ported from about 40 years and 5 editions of varying sourcebooks with sometimes contradictory information, but this post is already getting kinda long and in the end, this is what my Pendragon conversion boils down to.

There are three phases to a given year which basically follow the Pendragon model. RP heavy phase around Easter, one adventure a year in the summer, and then a manorial management-heavy Winter Phase. I'm aiming for about one year per two sessions right now.

Winter Phase is a concept almost entirely alien to Pathfinder, to DnD in general. Yes, Kingmaker has a whole system for settlement building and all that, but that felt almost too intensive for a single session that also needed to involve summarizing the non-adventuring year by, effectively, rolling on a bunch of tables.

So I made my own manorial management system. Very rough, don't get me wrong, it's far from polished and it might fall apart at the slightest breeze, but it's functional-adjacent. It works in a very basic video game-y manner: you have a manor, it generates money, you spend money on improvements or staff who, in turn, generate more money or yearly XP or who give you bonuses on skill checks. Does this math check out? Would it mean the greater lords passively accrue enough XP to level up practically every year? I don't know! I'm working on that. Probably not. It's probably fine.

The rest of Winter Phase is, as I've said, mostly comprised of rolling on Tables. We've got Life Events, Aging, Family, Stable, a Stewardship roll (which is a Skill check that spouses or professional stewards can make in place of the knight), and the all-important Salt Check which grants additional XP and determines what sorts of fabulous gifts or grants a character qualifies for for Christmas. All of this, narratively, taking place as the knights getting together at either a Christmas or New Year's feast and talking about what they've been up to since the last time they were all together.

Then there's battles, sieges, and raids, all of which I've created my own systems for. Now, I know Pathfinder has a mass combat system and I know Pendragon's is very different. I also know that, at least for my group, the Pathfinder system introduces a lot of extra numbers to keep track of and tends to slow down the game. So I took inspiration from Pendragon for the basic idea and I ended up oversimplifying it to "add this number to this number and bingo bango you're doing a battle." Again, is it a good system? I dunno. It's really simple, it's really basic. Wargamers would hate it, anyone who wanted a robust system for mass combat would hate it. But it functions and Mearcred Creek, at least, didn't feel like a slog like DnD combat sometimes can. I've made a similar system for sieges and I more or less reduced raids to rolling on tables with some modifiers.

And, yes, all players are knights. They start as landed knights, holding a title and an estate, regardless to their actual player class. They begin with Low Fantasy point buy (which will change for later characters as the Enchantment of Britain waxes and wanes, merging Earth with Faerie) at the age of 21 (when they receive their knighthood), and they'll start taking more serious aging penalties once they hit 35 (standard -1 to Physical Ability Scores, +1 to Mental, but also the potential for more aging penalties during the Winter Phase).

They also all start as humans. They can marry into various homebrew, non-human bloodlines and produce half-human offspring with often fantastic powers, but they all default to humans. Later, they'll have the potential to play as Cambions (half demons), Changelings (weak Fae), Dogheaded Men (what it says on the tin), Elflings (half elves), Fomorions (The Hulk), and Half-Giants (tall, strong humans).

I've got ten classes available, each which sounded justifiable based on Arthurian literature: Barbarian, Bard, Cavalier, Cleric, Druid, Fighter, Paladin, Ranger, Rogue, and Sorcerer. I felt like there was sufficient precedent in the Arthurian literature to include knights who were squishy and had magic powers (Sir Menw the Magician for example) and more than enough justification for knights who could call upon divine miracles. But there wasn't enough material to justify wuxia monks (which I don't object to in other settings, it just doesn't fit this one) or wizards who have to dedicate all their time to studying magic. And Cavaliers just kinda make perfect sense for the setting so I threw them in. This way the players have enough variety to not have characters that all overlap in virtually every functional, mechanical way. Even though they're knights, they're very different knights.

Religions are, as per Pendragon: Roman Christian (closer to Orthodoxy than Catholicism, the Great Schism hasn't happened yet), British Christian (a mixture of Christianity and British folk religion founded by Joseph of Arimathea and predating Roman Christianity on Albion), and British Pagan (a Romano-Celtic grab bag of beliefs). All of these are being treated, for the sake of the game, as true in one way or another. No Law, no Chaos, no specifically Good religion, no specifically Evil religion. There can be Roman or Pagan Clerics, Roman or BC Paladins, and BC or Pagan Druids (to kinda balance out the divine casters).

Other than that, it's...not a whole lot different from standard Pathfinder. Sure the setting is different, there are a lot fewer magical enemies earlier on (after Arthur pulls the sword from the stone things will really start to trend toward the fantastic; this will end up being a more Welsh Arthur than the GPC assumes if you know what I mean), but functionally, it's mechanically still Pathfinder. Just Pathfinder with extra tables and a different time scale.

It's a design in progress. And a campaign in progress. Our third session is Saturday night (so, in about sixteen hours for me). We're starting the second year, AD 486, tonight and things are going smooth so far. I gotta say, its not a perfect conversion, probably not my most elegant work of game design, but I kinda really like this Frankensteinian monster I've cobbled together.

I am, of course, open to questions, comments, and criticism.

[Saintheart]

You, sir, are a good DM.

Always wanted to play Pendragon, never had the opportunity. Love reading your chopshopped Pathfinder version and wish you all the absolute best with your campaign.

[Thane of Fife]

Pendragon is one of my favorite RPGs, but even though I like the rules a lot (I am presently running a game in a D&D setting using Pendragon), I've used D&D (AD&D 2e in my case) to run parts of the GPC as well (I referred to this as Pendragon-Minus-Pendragon).

In any case, it's all fun, so I wish you good luck!

Some comments:
Traits and passions are intended to be something of a trade-off in Pendragon. You usually get a bonus when they're high, but this also causes you to lose some agency. If you keep them at more moderate values, you usually either don't have to roll or are much more likely to not be affected by them. The benefits are very large, so you usually want to take the risk, and this leads to the Arthurian type who is extremely capable but occasionally does something tremendously foolish. You could probably try to represent something like this (if you wanted to) by allowing personality flaws and bonus feats, or something like that. You would just need to be clear that taking the flaw is accepting the loss of agency, and that this could lead to a character dying (or other serious consequences).

Note that battles in Pendragon are nothing like most combat rules. By default, the player knights don't have any ability to influence the outcome of the battle. They're just a few knights out of hundreds or thousands. Instead, it's basically a series of random encounters (possibly leading up to some sort of major encounter) where you earn lots of glory each battle round. It focuses on the personal experiences of the player knights and not the battle as a whole. Whatever system you use, it's probably better to generate stuff like, "Oh no, you've been cut off from friendly troops and have to fight your way back to safety" or "Look, there's the enemy standard bearer" or "Sir Amlyn's been pulled off of his horse and you need to go rescue him (or not)" than "You right flank is being driven back." It is a microcosm of the Great Pendragon Campaign: you're not telling the story of King Arthur (or the battle), you're telling the story of the player knights, with King Arthur (or the battle) as a backdrop.

Pendragon combat is very different from D&D combat. Numbers matter more in Pendragon. In D&D, a 10th level fighter will beat 20 goblins easily. In Pendragon, Lancelot would stand a good chance of losing to 20 Saxons (at least in a straight slugfest). You may see this in your upcoming Pendragon year, where there are a few tough monsters to fight. In Pendragon, the knights can win those fights by fighting as a group. But a relatively straight conversion to Pathfinder might make those fights too difficult.

And here's just some thoughts on what I did:
I limited starting classes to fighter, ranger, paladin, cleric, and certain bards. I allowed characters to dual-class to other classes later, but they all have to start off as recognizably being knights.

I used variant magic rules from Spells & Magic. The Pendragon 4e magic rules require magicians to sleep for weeks after casting spells. The variant AD&D rules cause characters to become exhausted as they cast, taking significant penalties and possibly even killing themselves if they cast too much. They recover faster than in Pendragon, so it was less disruptive, but I thought it created an interesting dynamic where every spell cast was a pretty big deal. It also helped to keep the warrior types more towards the forefront.

I used knockdown and critical hit rules from Combat &Tactics to make combat a little more dangerous. In Pendragon, characters usually survive fights unless they take an unlucky critical hit, so this helped to emulate that a bit.

I said that characters spend most of their income on their expenses, as in Pendragon, and only allowed minor gold income per year. I didn't use any sort of manor management rules. I also gave characters enough experience points to accumulate 1/10th of a level each winter (in addition to whatever they earned adventuring). That was to represent training and help them continue to advance in years where they might not accomplish much.

[Baelon]

You, sir, are a good DM.

Always wanted to play Pendragon, never had the opportunity. Love reading your chopshopped Pathfinder version and wish you all the absolute best with your campaign.

Thanks! I really think it has potential and I'm, of course, really jazzed to run a campaign in the setting. I'd love to play or run the actual rpg, but I don't expect to have the opportunity. So this is a happy medium for me.



Traits and passions are intended to be something of a trade-off in Pendragon. You usually get a bonus when they're high, but this also causes you to lose some agency. If you keep them at more moderate values, you usually either don't have to roll or are much more likely to not be affected by them. The benefits are very large, so you usually want to take the risk, and this leads to the Arthurian type who is extremely capable but occasionally does something tremendously foolish. You could probably try to represent something like this (if you wanted to) by allowing personality flaws and bonus feats, or something like that. You would just need to be clear that taking the flaw is accepting the loss of agency, and that this could lead to a character dying (or other serious consequences).

I had toyed with something similar earlier in the design since Pathfinder does have the Traits and Flaws in I think Ultimate Campaign, but I've had some of my players, in the past, express disinterest in that type of system and in actual play we tended to forget the Flaws or players would go out of their way to avoid triggering said Flaws. That's been a few years ago and I'm willing to bet that if I were like, "okay, this is a big part of this campaign, we're going to take it a lot more seriously," it could be made to work, but in the current, ongoing design, it wasn't something I ended up going with.



Note that battles in Pendragon are nothing like most combat rules. By default, the player knights don't have any ability to influence the outcome of the battle. They're just a few knights out of hundreds or thousands. Instead, it's basically a series of random encounters (possibly leading up to some sort of major encounter) where you earn lots of glory each battle round. It focuses on the personal experiences of the player knights and not the battle as a whole. Whatever system you use, it's probably better to generate stuff like, "Oh no, you've been cut off from friendly troops and have to fight your way back to safety" or "Look, there's the enemy standard bearer" or "Sir Amlyn's been pulled off of his horse and you need to go rescue him (or not)" than "You right flank is being driven back." It is a microcosm of the Great Pendragon Campaign: you're not telling the story of King Arthur (or the battle), you're telling the story of the player knights, with King Arthur (or the battle) as a backdrop.

That's what I'd gleaned from the Pendragon campaign I've listened to and it's a model I've tried to emulate within my conversion. So, the Battle system I'm running with is, like I described, inelegant. But the combat resolution isn't the core to Battles, the more important part--the part that drives the narrative--is the Battle Events Table that characters roll on to see what happens to them, specifically, during the Battle. It gives each character a situation to be exposed to and react to within the overall encounter. It basically gives them each a little scene within the larger narrative.

So, for instance, at Mearcred Creek, Sir Amig--their commander--got unhorsed by a Saxon berserker, and his former squire (one of the PCs) had to step up to command the battle. One of his companions saved an Irish mercenary who was fighting under Uther's banner and who'd become separated from his unit. And another one of the PCs ended up tackling and capturing the Saxon commander when the horn for retreat was blown and both sides started to withdraw. Everyone had their own little event within the story of the Mearcred Creek, but they were also rolling dice for the Battle itself to make it seem like they had an impact on how the bigger fight was going.



Pendragon combat is very different from D&D combat. Numbers matter more in Pendragon. In D&D, a 10th level fighter will beat 20 goblins easily. In Pendragon, Lancelot would stand a good chance of losing to 20 Saxons (at least in a straight slugfest). You may see this in your upcoming Pendragon year, where there are a few tough monsters to fight. In Pendragon, the knights can win those fights by fighting as a group. But a relatively straight conversion to Pathfinder might make those fights too difficult.

Yeah, Pendragon combat seems WAY more deadly than DnD, even harsher DnD. But the disparity isn't something that I think is wholly at odds with Arthurian tradition. I think Arthurian literature can support knightly protagonists going up against--and winning against--scores of foes, singlehandedly. Lancelot, Kay, Gawain, Galahad, most of the legendary knights are described at various times as fighting a hundred men at a time (in the Welsh traditions they were downright superhuman). And DnD--Pathfinder--for sure lends itself better to a more Welsh Arthuriana.

That being said...yeah, I looked at doing a 1:1 conversion of the encounters for 486 and, man, they'd be easily overwhelmed. Talk about deadly combat. The Nuckelavee by itself is CR 9. That's too much for a bunch of 1st Level knights, even running a massive eight person party (!) like I am. Someone would for sure die. Probably a few people. So I am reworking some things, trying not to TPK everyone in the third session. It definitely requires adaption, I don't want to send them to certain death, but I'm also not afraid to kill them if they bite off way more than they can chew. I'm going more Welsh than Mallory, more pulp than Greg intended, but I think it works for what it is.



I limited starting classes to fighter, ranger, paladin, cleric, and certain bards. I allowed characters to dual-class to other classes later, but they all have to start off as recognizably being knights.

Reasonable. I went with an approach that was more "you're the children of landed nobility, you've been trained in knightly skills, but who knows how much of it stuck, you've got your own stuff going on, and Uther is mass-knighting squires right now to make up numbers." I gave them all kits (provided by their lord) that equipped everyone with swords, armor, shields, spears, and horses (even if they have a hard time using them or choose not to do so at all) and explained it as "well, they're equipping you the best way they know how."



I used variant magic rules from Spells & Magic. The Pendragon 4e magic rules require magicians to sleep for weeks after casting spells. The variant AD&D rules cause characters to become exhausted as they cast, taking significant penalties and possibly even killing themselves if they cast too much. They recover faster than in Pendragon, so it was less disruptive, but I thought it created an interesting dynamic where every spell cast was a pretty big deal. It also helped to keep the warrior types more towards the forefront.

That's a really cool idea and I might steal it, to be honest. At the very least for bigger, higher level spells. And then, casting those spells might become easier to do once the Enchantment starts and magic starts becoming more commonplace. I really like that.



I used knockdown and critical hit rules from Combat &Tactics to make combat a little more dangerous. In Pendragon, characters usually survive fights unless they take an unlucky critical hit, so this helped to emulate that a bit.

I'm treating anything that knocks a character unconscious or any critical hit as inflicting a Severe Wound and triggering an Aging roll during Winter Phase to simulate lingering injuries that negatively impact a character's life going forward (which can be negated with a Cure Serious Wounds, but only if cast during the same combat where the Wound was inflicted). Combat is still survivable, healing magic still saves lives, but near death experiences still leave lasting scars. And critical failures when attacking sunder weapons, critical hits sunder armor. Just to make those moments feel a lot more impactful.



I said that characters spend most of their income on their expenses, as in Pendragon, and only allowed minor gold income per year. I didn't use any sort of manor management rules. I also gave characters enough experience points to accumulate 1/10th of a level each winter (in addition to whatever they earned adventuring). That was to represent training and help them continue to advance in years where they might not accomplish much.

So, Winter Phase in my system is a whole process that goes like this:

- Players roll on the Life Events Table to determine major non-adventurous things that happen during the year. This can be stuff like Hunting or You Saw a Spooky Bird or You Fell in Love. And then those can have secondary effects and they spin off into a short little scene that might come back later.

- Players then make a Stewardship Roll (new skill, INT modifier) using either their own skill or their wife's or that of a designated professional Steward that they've hired. That roll is then multiplied by 5 and added to their manor's base earnings (60 gp +Improvements) and any penalties are subtracted from THAT, the result of which is the amount of money they made that year.

So 60 gp per manor + (1d20 + Stewardship Roll) * 5 - Penalties = Treasury

- They then decide how lavishly they've been living for the last year (which consumes most of their Treasury, necessarily, and has various mechanical implications) and after that, the can then decide if they've spent any money on building more Improvements or hiring Staff or whatever.

- After that they'll roll Aging (if necessary), then make their Stable rolls to see if their horses died

- After that, they have a chance to try to get married (if they're not already) or court someone or flirt with someone

- Then come Childbirth, Child Survival, and Family Events all of which have implications for future roleplay and which sometimes have mechanical effects, too

- Then comes the Salt Check which determines how close they are to the richer nobles during the Christmas/New Year's feast (which gives them additional XP/Glory) and what sort of fancy gifts or grants they'll be eligible for during the Feast

- And then, lastly, I hand out XP and gifts that they've accumulated over the year

This all takes place, narratively, as the PCs getting together during the Christmas/New Year's feast and telling each other about what they've all been up to since the last time they saw each other (whenever their last big adventure was). In-character, it's them bragging or bemoaning how their year has gone.

[Seward]

Note that battles in Pendragon are nothing like most combat rules. By default, the player knights don't have any ability to influence the outcome of the battle. They're just a few knights out of hundreds or thousands.


Unless the character is involved in a key battle position (overall leader, left/right/center commander, I think there is another layer too in bigger battles). Then your battle skill has a profound impact on whether the line breaks and whether you do damage. In pathfinder terms Battle skill could be modeled as a "Battle CMD" offensive and defensive or some kind of opposed skill check.

When running your own land, your battle skill is also extremely important in deciding if thos saxon raiders are a menace, or a hoped-for free source of equipment, glory and ransoms.

Random knights with unusually high battle skills will somtimes get assigned key positions in very desperate battles. Usually the guy who ends up in such positions is determined by politics and ranks. (which is why I remember a third level...I think there is a spot where you put your best dude in charge, kinda like a Roman Centurian, regardless of rank. I had a character with much higher battle skill than the folks he swore fealty to and remember trying to make the roll after they both botched theirs at a higher level)

======

Overall, mostly this is a matter of pacing, as others noticed. You have kind of adventure season, battle/land management season and winter. Most years don't have adventures. Most years don't have battles unless you are in period where Arthur was consolidating his reign or you are in a period where your holdings get raided a lot (or a culture where YOU raid every year). So it might be calendar years between levels since the characters spend most of their time as "downtime". That's a major trick to getting the dynastic stuff. Glory as XP and resources as wealth works fine, although in Pendragon wealth is usually "income producing land" not gear directly, and just holding land without ruining it will get you some yearly glory.

If you get the pacing right, the other primary challenge of a Pendragon conversion is the Religion and Personality Trait system. You get glory for extreme traits, you get glory for traits that match your religious values. It is a lot harder for the Church to mess with you if you are famous for following its values. Of course Pagans and Christians had some diametric opposed traits (proud vs humble for example) so multiple religions make it impossible to be well loved by all of them. And as others noted, extreme traits are great for passive glory gain and can serve to give you bonuses in battle or combat (or something to overcome if unsuited for situation) but the price for that is loss of agency. They're like Hero system psychological complications or Fate system Aspects. Both helpful and harmful. Pathfinder doesn't have anything like this beyond class fluff that is rarely mechanically backed up, so you will have to homebrew this as the passions were vital to Pendragon style play.



Yeah, Pendragon combat seems WAY more deadly than DnD, even harsher DnD.


Well yes and no. It's about as harsh as low level D&D. Well, and also healing in any way other than going home and hoping it doesn't fester and kill you or leave a limp is extraordinarily rare

The thing is though, in Pendragon, criticals mattered a lot, and if your skill got high enough you could "force" criticals". This is why Lancelot could not be beat in jousting. He had 40 skill, which is an autocrit (there is something similar in battle, you could build a battle commander that literally would automatically get max terrain advantage and could not ever have his line break). The very best you can do vs Lancelot is tie, and if you didn't also have 40 skill eventually he woud dump you on your ass. If beating him in a joust is essential, you better figure out how to cheat.

With characters that had advanced for decades and avoided dying of age (easier if your glory per year is high enough, it was possible to be immortal by spending glory buying off aging characteristic loss), we saw two major directions.

You had characters who were amazing at land management. This often overlapped with military commanders as defending vs raids for cash and glory is helpful. Those guys often were the ones who rose to higher nobilty as their deeds and competence were rewarded with titles and lands. These often managed a good marriage to kickstart their career and schemed about their kids alliances. These are also the folks who THROW tournaments.

Then you had characters who put all their glory into martial skills and physical attributes. We called them "mega-knights". They got skills higher than 20 (where crits happened with much greater frequency...critting affected both attack and block-style defense) and could dish out damage similar to giants. They might not beat Lancelot in Jousting but in a real fight, well, maybe and even if he won he'd be beat up. They were certainly on a similar tier with the more martial round table knights like Gawaine, Galahad etc, although doing it on raw glory, not through family or religious boosts. These dudes tended to be minor knights with minimal land. They're out doing tournaments or questing instead of doing land management so they get a gift of a major piece of equipment or mount they can't afford for their deeds, not usually land and titles. Typical martial advancement in Pathfinder would work fine for these folks. Just make sure that if somebody like Lancelot exists that he's either at a level they can't achieve, or that you're ok with the Kings Champion losing a duel to a PC at some point.

Basically you can get a martial that can in fact defeat a bunch of ordinary Saxon warriors - IF he's on horseback in heavy armor. Armor in Pendragon soaked damage, BAB-equivalent was also a parry skill, and critical parry meant no damage regardless of what the other dude rolled. If you abstract the hitpoint system as successful armor soaking+parries and only inflict those potentially festering wounds when folks go unconscious you get pretty similar outcomes. It's just that in Pendragon it was random, a dude with 30 sword skill rolls poorly right when the random bandit crits and something serious happens. In Pathfinder you attrit down the ability to defend perfectly till the wounds get "real", you could even see low hitpoints as a fatigue/blood loss from minor injuries mechanic. Since healing isn't available, aside from rest, these tend to carry over into future fights. Against mooks who didn't hit as hard as warriors with axes, heavy armor would pretty much make you invulnerable unless you fumbled a parry or they critted and even then, you'd usually be ok. That simulates the very high AC of fullplate+shield pretty well. You need "named" opponents, monsters with higher base attack rolls or just very strong mooks (like L1 orc barbarians with greataxe) that can hurt you significantly when they roll a nat 20.

If you were a military leader, having a bodyguard of Mega-Knights was helpful. One of the random events in battle was "chance for glory" where you attack a key enemy and try to capture them for ransom. Generally the attacker is outnumbered, as it was usually the losing side that got this option, or so it seemed. But if you have Mega-Knight buddies your odds of pulling it off are much higher. If you are that battle commander who can't be beat though, expect to be on the receiving end of that if you are winning in spite of massive numerical disadvantage. Gawaine level bodyguards can prevent that desperate chance from defeating your army.