It always bothered me that under the standard glory awards, you get this:

An ordinary knight gets 50 glory for defeating an ordinary knight. So he needs to defeat 20 knights of his rank to gain a glory bonus.
An extraordinary knight gains 500 glory for defeating an another extraordinary knight. So he only needs to defeat 2 knights of his own rank to gain a glory award.

I think you can probably guess where I'm going with this.

Ordinary and Notable Knights: glory for defeating enemies as standard.
Famous Knights: Half glory for defeating enemies.
Extraordinary Knights: divide glory for defeating enemies by 5.
Legendary Knights (16,000+): divide glory for defeating enemies by 10.

I also tweaked the glory awards for defeating knights as follows:
Ordinary = 25 40
Notable = 50 80
Famous = 100 120
Extraordinary = 200,
Legendary = 300.

Most of the awards for other opponents, like bandits, saxons, etc. are unchanged.
Monsters that were capable of facing more than one pc at a time typically had their base glory doubled, to a maximum of 500.

So, a Small Giant, normally worth 50 glory, now has a standard glory of 100. If beaten by a single ordinary knight, he gets 100 glory. If defeated by a single extraordinary knight, it's only worth 20. If an ordinary and an extraordinary knight kill it together, they'd both get 50 glory, but the extraordinary knight would reduce that to 10. Which is reasonable - it's likely a lot less risky for him!

Quest awards, awards for skill or trait checks, and the like are unchanged.

Since I'm the GM I can calculate these awards on the fly, before I assign them to the players, and the players don't have any more book-keeping to do.

Note that this works best when combined with a system for enhancing the effects of glory bonuses, as described in here (http://nocturnal-media.com/forum/index.php?topic=1415.0).

Interesting idea as usual, Darren. :)

It seems to offer a chance to head off the exponential gathering of glory once the PK reaches the critical mass (somewhere around sword 24, I'd say), and it is that exponential growth that has caused problems for some people as those knights gather enough Glory to stave off Aging itself.

However, I am curious as to why didn't you decide to divide all the Defeated Enemy Glory rewards? You explicitly state that Saxons are exempt. The 'problem' I see is that for an Ordinary knight, defeating a Saxon is what, 35 Glory, and defeating a Notable knight (and presumably tougher than a Saxon warrior) is 50 Glory. However, that same knight, later in his career when he is Famous, gets only 25 Glory for the Notable knight and the same 35 Glory for the Saxon! And it gets MUCH worse as he gains in Glory. He should go exclusively Saxon hunting at that point. And a normal bandit would be worth as much as a Notable Knight, when he himself is an Extraordinary Knight. This doesn't feel right to me.

Here's how I'd do it... I'd start with reasonable values for everybody (the missing Glory rewards from Greg's page or 4th ed). You might have to tweak some of the monster Glory rewards... Then, I'd take your suggestion but alter it slightly:
Ordinary Knights: Quadruple Glory for defeated enemies.
Notable Knights: Double Glory for defeated enemies.
Famous Knights: Normal Glory for defeated enemies.
Extraordinary Knight: Half Glory for defeated enemies.
Legendary Knight: 1/5th Glory for defeated enemies.

I'd have the knight glory rewards as: 50/100/250/500/1000. An ordinary knight needs to beat 5 ordinary knights. A Notable knight needs to beat 5 comparable opponents and a Famous knights 4 other famous knights. An Extraordinary knight needs to beat 4 extraordinary knights and a Legendary knight 5 legendary knights. So 4-5 basically 50/50 fights to gain a glory point. Sounds a mite risky.

But wait, I have made the ordinary and the notable knight much faster than in the book! Oh noes! Lets see how fast...

Lets say that our Ordinary knight used to need 400 defeated enemy glory on top of quest completion glory, yearly glory and starting glory to reach 2000. So now he needs only 100 'old glory', a difference of 300 Glory.

Our Notable knight needs 2000 glory for the next level. Lets say half of that used to be gained from defeated enemies, so 1000. Now he needs only 500 'old glory', so a difference of 500 Glory.

In short, by the time the characters reach Extraordinary (lets assume half of 4000 again, so 2000 defeated enemy glory), they would have needed to gain 3400 under old system and 2600 'old glory' under this homebrew. So yeah, about one 'free' Glory point out of 8 that they have gained to reach this level. I am not too worried at this point. And they'd pay that extra glory back while slogging up to 9000 in this new system.

So this would inflate the Glory a bit at low levels, where it is not a problem at all, and severely curtail it at upper levels, where it is a problem (or at least 'a feature').

Consider it a compromise between your 'harsh' system, Darren, and the 'overly generous' system of old glory system. :) (if you are more comfortable with the ~10 knights of same class, just divide glory multiplier in all classes by two.)

In your system:
Ordinary knight: 40 ordinary knights to go up a glory point (yikes!), x2 the old system (reflecting the lowered values)
Notable knight: 20 notable knights to go up a glory point (still yikes!), x2 the old system (ditto)
Famous knight: 20 famous knights to go up a glory point (eck!), x5 the old system (ditto, and halving)
Extraordinary knight: 25 extraordinary knights yadda yadda, x12.5 the old system
Legendary knight: 34 legendary knights..., x34 (?) the old system (does it even have a glory reward for legendary?)

For One... Single... Glory... Point. You'll have to defeat 34 of your peers in life-or-death combat. Harsh, man. (And note that they'd only need to kill 30 ordinary Saxon warriors for that same glory point...)

Lets calculate quickly the aggregate number of equal knights defeated in life-or-death duels using my proposal (and assumptions):
Ordinary Knight: 2 knights to push him to Notable (400 glory on top of everything else). Sounds about right. He has already proven himself to be the better man than at least two other knights.
Notable Knight: 5 knight to gain the missing 1000 glory (the other 1000 comes from other sources) to qualify to Famous knight. So this guy has already won 7 serious duels. Hmm.
Famous Knight: 2000 fight glory (again, 2000 from somewhere else) so 8 famous knights defeated to qualify to Extraordinary knight. 15 total duels against equal opponents during his career. Serious dude.
Extraordinary knight: 4000 glory needed so 16 knights to become a Legendary knight. 31 total 50/50 duels won.

Now, I fully realize that not all duels are to the death, which tends to skew the survivability odds a lot. Also, knights often engage against the 'previous tier' opponents, which tends to be somewhat less risky, especially once you start getting to the extraordinary range. This causes the numbers to change to (2+10+20+32) or at least 2 knights defeated to gain Notable, 12 to gain Famous, 32 to have Extraordinary and 64 to become Legendary. These numbers are of course estimates and have some serious assumptions in there... Lets take an extreme case and assume all that fight glory comes from defeating ordinary knights (50 Glory a piece): 2+10+40+160 = 2 / 12 / 52 / 212. And times two if he is not gaining any glory from anywhere else (highly unlikely).

In your case suggestion, the aggregates would be (again, same assumptions as above as to the proportion of fight glory):
Ordinary -> Notable: 16 ordinary knights (400 Glory), total: 16 equal fights
Notable -> Famous: 20 notable knights (1000 Glory), total: 36 equal fights
Famous -> Extraordinary: 40 famous knights (2000 Glory), total: 76 equal fights
Extraordinary -> Legendary: 100 extraordinary knights (4000 Glory), total: 176 equal fights

I have a hard time believing that the PKs could survive all those fights. (Of course there are those Glory-rich Saxon snacks... :) ) Have you actually tried playing with this system yet? How did it go?

In Summary, I think your system is too harsh. You have halved most of the knight Glory rewards and then you have introduced another divisor quite early in the game. Which is fine, if you wish to de-emphasize defeated enemy glory. Actually, what I think will happen is that the proportions shift: the PKs gain less glory from fighting other knights, but since the (most) other sources remain the same, they will simply gain Glory points via yearly glory and completing Quests and shining in court. So this might slow them down, maybe another half a year / year (so instead of taking 2 years + defeated enemies during two years, they need three years and the defeated enemies from that). That would be my gut-feeling. Of course it slows down a lot more at higher glory, where in the old system the proportion of kill glory to yearly glory is much more skewed for the kill glory.

I, personally, feel that if the PKs have managed to defeat 4 equal opponents each, they can have their Glory point! :) Chances of that happening is about 1/2 x 1/2 x 1/2 x 1/2 = 1/16th, if all the fights have been to the death/ransom.

Actually i've made you write all that, in response to something I'd misremembered. The scheme I posted above is the scheme I originally came up with. Then I noticed the same thing you wrote, and so altered it to the one below. Since it's a while since I've played, my memory stuck on the original version. Sigh.

Actual cost scheme I used:
Ordinary: 40.
Notable: 80
Famous: 120
Extraordinary: 200
Legendary: 300.

The goal was to drastically reduce the glory for higher tier characters, but not affect it *that* much for lower tier characters when faced by equally low tier characters.

You noted that players would need to kill a lot of knights or squires to get a glory point, and were skeptical they would survive. It's not as bleak as that, since a lot of glory comes from quest awards, annual glory, all the little 10 and 20 point awards players accumulate during an adventure for skill and trait tests at certain moments, battles, etc. I'd say even when using the official system, my players often gained half or less of their total glory from personal combat - except when they became Famous and Extrordinary, their combat glory would massively escalate - mainly because of the knights they were now capable of defeating with regularity.
This system doesn't change things much when players are Ordinary and Notable, but as player glory and power increases, the balance between ocmbat glory and non-combat glory doesn't become as lopsided.

edited to add
Incidentally, the earliest design for this syetsm used the official glory awards, and had the following dividers:
Ordinary: x1
Notable: divide by 2
Famous: divide by 5
Extraordinary: divide by 10.
This had the pleasing effect that knights facing their own tier always got 50 glory, the same as a standard knight. That wouldn't be too bad, but I wanted to add an extra tier for Legendary knights, AND the difference bwteen ordinary knight and notable knight in play, for PCs, is negligible. Some pc knights skip the ordinary phase entirely, starting with 2000 glory, and the otehrs dont stay ordinary for long. It didn't seem worthwhile keeping a difference between them. The step up to Famous is something more, ahem, notable.

OK, that correction (and rereading what you said earlier about the bandits; i misunderstood that bit) does address a good chunk of my worries.

The only remaining problem that I can see is that in a hypothetical case, you may have a knight with 3990 Glory and 4010 Glory, and if they take down an Extraordinary knight together, their Glories become 4190 and 4110, which is a bit odd. But that is a minor 'bug' and I don't see any easy way to handle it. Might be just as well to shrug and go on.

Well... You could divide the Glory up by the fractions. Famous knight is 2 and Notable 1, so 200/3 = 67 Glory each. And of course the reasoning is the same logic you use in your own example, the Famous Knight presumably does more to hammer the enemy down.

But that is just a minor ruffle. I wouldn't lose any sleep over it, and the simplicity of just dividing by two would appeal to me as a player.

Good point. I haven't noticed that situation come up, but it may be because the way we track glory.
During a sesison, players put each individual glory award in that little box at the top of the character sheet, and at the end total them up.
They may have something like (numbers picked purely at random):
10+13+80 (Sir Villain)+100(Quest of the Green tower)+17+18
Then at the end of the year, we just total them up and add to the total, and they make a note of the ones worthy of special note.
So, situations like the one you mention may well occur, they just aren't noticed in the moment.