What happens when you think everything is a level-appropriate encounter

[thirdkingdom]

That player must have had so much fun getting one-shotted by a guy he had no reason to believe was that powerful, and then getting laughed at by the DM for getting killed by a much more powerful NPC

I would be super annoyed by this, because there's absolutely no telegraphing that the character is going to die here. Yes, the knight is question just won a jousting tournament, but that certainly doesn't mean will more than double your hit points with one attack. And the knight is hardly insistent that they don't fight. There's no "jousting with combat lances is dangerous" or "my honour says I cannot." He says it might be lethal, then straight up offers a deal that is very attractive to a player that has no idea how strong this knight is, and the penalty for losing is already very high without death being involved in the first place.

Maybe you're paraphrasing and it played out differently in game, but this feels really bad to me. This is not a player rushing into danger despite warnings. This is a player not knowing the risk and being punished anyway.

Is this encounter fun for anyone? The player that died isn't. He was killed in one hit like it was nothing. The other party members aren't, they lost an ally and all of their gear and were forced to stand and watch as the DM punished them. The DM was probably having fun, but a game where only one person was having fun is not a very good game. There a so many ways this encounter could have gone, even if the player insisted on the duel, that would have been much more fun for everyone involved, instead of just a feel bad moment and the DM laughing at the players.

The glaring flaw with this argument, of course, is the premise -- baked in with the phrase "level-appropriate challenge -- that every combat needs to be resolved through combat. I agree, if the encounter were set up by the DM in such a way that it *had* to be resolved through combat, then yes, it would be a jerk move. But my impression from the OP was that there were multiple ways the encounter could be resolved, of which combat is only one potential way.

Even describing encounters as "level appropriate" subtly suggests that every encounter is really designed to be resolved through combat.

[Knaight]

Is this encounter fun for anyone? The player that died isn't. He was killed in one hit like it was nothing. The other party members aren't, they lost an ally and all of their gear and were forced to stand and watch as the DM punished them. The DM was probably having fun, but a game where only one person was having fun is not a very good game. There a so many ways this encounter could have gone, even if the player insisted on the duel, that would have been much more fun for everyone involved, instead of just a feel bad moment and the DM laughing at the players.

You're assuming that they didn't have fun because your criteria for fun weren't met. That's not a safe assumption.

[RazorChain]

That player must have had so much fun getting one-shotted by a guy he had no reason to believe was that powerful, and then getting laughed at by the DM for getting killed by a much more powerful NPC

I would be super annoyed by this, because there's absolutely no telegraphing that the character is going to die here. Yes, the knight is question just won a jousting tournament, but that certainly doesn't mean will more than double your hit points with one attack. And the knight is hardly insistent that they don't fight. There's no "jousting with combat lances is dangerous" or "my honour says I cannot." He says it might be lethal, then straight up offers a deal that is very attractive to a player that has no idea how strong this knight is, and the penalty for losing is already very high without death being involved in the first place.

Maybe you're paraphrasing and it played out differently in game, but this feels really bad to me. This is not a player rushing into danger despite warnings. This is a player not knowing the risk and being punished anyway.

Is this encounter fun for anyone? The player that died isn't. He was killed in one hit like it was nothing. The other party members aren't, they lost an ally and all of their gear and were forced to stand and watch as the DM punished them. The DM was probably having fun, but a game where only one person was having fun is not a very good game. There a so many ways this encounter could have gone, even if the player insisted on the duel, that would have been much more fun for everyone involved, instead of just a feel bad moment and the DM laughing at the players.

Let's look at this from another perspective. Let's say the setting is the wild west and the PC's meet a cowboy and one of them recognizes him as one of the fastest guns in the west. One PC who is a competent gunman challenges him to a duel.

The cowboy warns him that they will be using real guns and the PC scoffs saying "Hell yeah". Then the cowboy promply ends him in the duel making sure the PC doesnt get off a shot.

The death is on the players head not the GM. He chose to put his character at risk against a deadly foe.

[neriractor]

That player must have had so much fun getting one-shotted by a guy he had no reason to believe was that powerful, and then getting laughed at by the DM for getting killed by a much more powerful NPC

I would be super annoyed by this, because there's absolutely no telegraphing that the character is going to die here. Yes, the knight is question just won a jousting tournament, but that certainly doesn't mean will more than double your hit points with one attack. And the knight is hardly insistent that they don't fight. There's no "jousting with combat lances is dangerous" or "my honour says I cannot." He says it might be lethal, then straight up offers a deal that is very attractive to a player that has no idea how strong this knight is, and the penalty for losing is already very high without death being involved in the first place.

just a small nitpick here, the knight didn´t just win a joust tournament, he won the king´s joust tournament, as in the tournament where only the best and biggest of that particular kingdom (and perhaps some close ones as well) get to fight. That seems like plenty of information about the guy´s threath level, also if (on an RPG) somebody that already told me he is using a lethal weapon told me that "fighting with lethal weapons is dangerous" I would take it as an insult and a challenge, instead of an actual warning (unless your DM is one of those "are you reallly REALLY sure?" types).

The deal was made after the PC picked a fight, and it was more so that if the PC won he was allowed to take the wealth of the knight, that happened to have company, whitout being attacked or seeing as an honorless bandit.

[John Longarrow]

That player must have had so much fun getting one-shotted by a guy he had no reason to believe was that powerful, and then getting laughed at by the DM for getting killed by a much more powerful NPC

I would be super annoyed by this, because there's absolutely no telegraphing that the character is going to die here. Yes, the knight is question just won a jousting tournament, but that certainly doesn't mean will more than double your hit points with one attack. And the knight is hardly insistent that they don't fight. There's no "jousting with combat lances is dangerous" or "my honour says I cannot." He says it might be lethal, then straight up offers a deal that is very attractive to a player that has no idea how strong this knight is, and the penalty for losing is already very high without death being involved in the first place.

Maybe you're paraphrasing and it played out differently in game, but this feels really bad to me. This is not a player rushing into danger despite warnings. This is a player not knowing the risk and being punished anyway.

Is this encounter fun for anyone? The player that died isn't. He was killed in one hit like it was nothing. The other party members aren't, they lost an ally and all of their gear and were forced to stand and watch as the DM punished them. The DM was probably having fun, but a game where only one person was having fun is not a very good game. There a so many ways this encounter could have gone, even if the player insisted on the duel, that would have been much more fun for everyone involved, instead of just a feel bad moment and the DM laughing at the players.

Just so we are clear, the OP posted

Traveling the wilderness, the PCs met with a certain knight and his retainers. One PC was proficient in Knowledge (Nobility and Royalty), and was told he remembers this knight as a winner of the King's Jousting Tournament. Another PC, upon hearing this, immediately decided to challenge the knight to a joust.

Lets make this a level appropriate encounter. 4th level party encounters an Ogre who is guarding a bridge. Ogre challenges the party to unarmed combat, one on one. Party wizard, upon hearing this, immediately decides to challenge the ogre. Stakes are if the ogre wins it gets the characters gear. If the character wins the party gets to pass and takes the ogres fancy ring.

At this point if an unbuffed wizard not built for melee steps up and gets clobbered by the ogre no one is going to bat an eye. Dumb mistake.

In the OPs post its obvious that the knight is built around charge attack (jousting) and the PC decided to take him on in his specialty.

To me, its pretty obvious that even if it was level appropriate the PC would probably loose just as badly since dedicated charger builds are pretty lethal when they charge. That the knight was higher level isn't nearly as relevant as a PC choosing to go against the obvious strength of an opponent.

[Telok]

I've had things go like this. In a Traveller game the players were flying a low/mid sized merchant ship and hauling something perfectly normal, agricultural machinery of some sort I think, when a couple of imperial cruisers overtake them and demand to send over a boarding party for an inspection. So a merchanter armed with a mining laser and capable of pulling 4g is pulled over by military ships sporting high powered lasers, missiles, and capable of 6g acceleration.

The players decide to fight. Specifically to ambush the imspection team, rig the shuttles to explode, and send the shuttles back to the cruisers. Long story short they killed about half the inspection team, the rest got back on the shuttles and left, and the cruisers cut their ship into chunks. End of game.

When everything is "level appropriate" then fighting is an option that the players expect to win. That leads to fighting often being the best or only option, especially if the game system doesn't have robust or well defined non-combat sections. Playing lots of games like that trains players to treat everything as a combat encounter to fight, and often it train them to just rush in attacking and never retreat.

Not everything has to be a combat encounter and not every game is built or run with the expectation that you should win all the fights. But some games train people to expect that.

[The Extinguisher]

You're assuming that they didn't have fun because your criteria for fun weren't met. That's not a safe assumption.

You're absolutely right actually. I can't assume they aren't having fun, and really shouldn't have brought it up.
It's still back encounter design though.

just a small nitpick here, the knight didn´t just win a joust tournament, he won the king´s joust tournament, as in the tournament where only the best and biggest of that particular kingdom (and perhaps some close ones as well) get to fight. That seems like plenty of information about the guy´s threath level, also if (on an RPG) somebody that already told me he is using a lethal weapon told me that "fighting with lethal weapons is dangerous" I would take it as an insult and a challenge, instead of an actual warning (unless your DM is one of those "are you reallly REALLY sure?" types).

The deal was made after the PC picked a fight, and it was more so that if the PC won he was allowed to take the wealth of the knight, that happened to have company, whitout being attacked or seeing as an honorless bandit.

The details of the joust tournament don't matter. Being (very) good at jousting does not translate into this kind of outlandish amounts of damage. There was no way the PC was winning this fight and that is bad design. This was not "the knight rolled a natural 20 and maxed out damage and just barely killed him wow" kind of fight. That's exciting and is the kind of thing that is brought up in posts like this. The amount of damage dished out here was more than double the PC's health. That's ridiculous. There's discouraging combat encounters and then there is straight up punishing your players for not doing things how you wanted them to.

Yeah the deal was made after the fight was picked, but if the fight was not supposed to be had, then why make the deal so attractive. This is inviting your player to die. Why not have the player offer the stakes, and go from there. Don't encourage your players to do things they aren't supposed to do, then punish them when they do it.

Just so we are clear, the OP posted



Lets make this a level appropriate encounter. 4th level party encounters an Ogre who is guarding a bridge. Ogre challenges the party to unarmed combat, one on one. Party wizard, upon hearing this, immediately decides to challenge the ogre. Stakes are if the ogre wins it gets the characters gear. If the character wins the party gets to pass and takes the ogres fancy ring.

At this point if an unbuffed wizard not built for melee steps up and gets clobbered by the ogre no one is going to bat an eye. Dumb mistake.

In the OPs post its obvious that the knight is built around charge attack (jousting) and the PC decided to take him on in his specialty.

To me, its pretty obvious that even if it was level appropriate the PC would probably loose just as badly since dedicated charger builds are pretty lethal when they charge. That the knight was higher level isn't nearly as relevant as a PC choosing to go against the obvious strength of an opponent.

100% not this situation, because I think it's a pretty safe assumption that the character who challenged this very good jouster to a jousting match who also carried a lance with them is a character who is good at jousting. This is your fighter challenging the ogre to a fight and getting killed because actually he's much much stronger than all of you and you were supposed to convince him to answer riddles or something else

Let's look at this from another perspective. Let's say the setting is the wild west and the PC's meet a cowboy and one of them recognizes him as one of the fastest guns in the west. One PC who is a competent gunman challenges him to a duel.

The cowboy warns him that they will be using real guns and the PC scoffs saying "Hell yeah". Then the cowboy promply ends him in the duel making sure the PC doesn't get off a shot.

The death is on the players head not the GM. He chose to put his character at risk against a deadly foe.

If you put a duelist in front of your players, and one of them is a duelist, expect a duel. If that duelist will 100% kill your players if they duel, you've put in a mousetrap, not a good encounter.


-

This encounter is bad because it takes a likely and frankly pretty reasonable solution to the obstacle, and makes it kill you out of nowhere. That kind of red herring encounter design is good in iterative gameplay, where you're expected to lose and lose and lose, and come back again looking at the encounter in unique ways. But that's not the case here. The player doesn't get to respawn with the knowledge of how lethal this knight really is and work a different angle. Instead they just lost, and all of their stuff was stolen and they feel bad. They don't learn to solve encounters through methods other than combat. They learn to be scared of doing to wrong thing in your encounters.
(quick side note, this isn't even combat. It's a joust. It already has a fail state that isn't death. It's losing the joust)
If you really want your players to explore solutions that aren't combat, you need to give them incentive. There are better consequences than player death. Maybe if you hadn't randomly killed that knight on the road and befriended him instead, you'd have a much easier time trying to talk to the king.

The point is, the player was presented with an obstacle and tried a solution. Instead of being given an honest attempt with their solution, they immediately failed and were killed. All because the DM didn't want them trying that solution. If this were reversed, about trying a noncombat solution when the DM wanted a fight, how many would say the encounter was bad?

[RazorChain]

If you put a duelist in front of your players, and one of them is a duelist, expect a duel. If that duelist will 100% kill your players if they duel, you've put in a mousetrap, not a good encounter.

Wait! What? So if I put a fighter in front of my players and one of them is a fighter, I should expect a fight?


So if Khelben Blackstaff shows up then the party wizard will immediately challenge him to a magical duel because he's a wizard as well?

So by this logic the world should never have more powerful NPC's than the PC's. Because if the PC's should bump into them and decide to fight them for no reason at all they could lose?

[Yukitsu]

Wait! What? So if I put a fighter in front of my players and one of them is a fighter, I should expect a fight?


So if Khelben Blackstaff shows up then the party wizard will immediately challenge him to a magical duel because he's a wizard as well?

So by this logic the world should never have more powerful NPC's than the PC's. Because if the PC's should bump into them and decide to fight them for no reason at all they could lose?

I think duelist is a special exception since unlike "wizard" or "fighter" duelists are individuals who seek out others and fight them in honourable(ish) combat one on one to test their abilities. A jouster is a type of one but I can't tell from the anecdote if the PC was one as well or not.

[hamishspence]

The difference is that this kind of duellist normally only duels at tourneys - with blunted weapons.

(Given that tourney lances break - you'd expect the tourney to provide them - and the jouster not to go around the countryside with one).

And he told the party that, and said his only weapons were lethal.

[thirdkingdom]

I think duelist is a special exception since unlike "wizard" or "fighter" duelists are individuals who seek out others and fight them in honourable(ish) combat one on one to test their abilities. A jouster is a type of one but I can't tell from the anecdote if the PC was one as well or not.

Are you seriously suggesting that there's a certain class out there that challenges *everybody* with a sword/bow/lance they encounter to a fight? That the only type of encounter possible with said class is combat?

[Knaight]

The details of the joust tournament don't matter. Being (very) good at jousting does not translate into this kind of outlandish amounts of damage. There was no way the PC was winning this fight and that is bad design. This was not "the knight rolled a natural 20 and maxed out damage and just barely killed him wow" kind of fight. That's exciting and is the kind of thing that is brought up in posts like this. The amount of damage dished out here was more than double the PC's health. That's ridiculous. There's discouraging combat encounters and then there is straight up punishing your players for not doing things how you wanted them to.

No, there was no way that they were winning this fight. However, even if we ignore the numerous things that aren't fighting that are possible, that doesn't mean a different fight involving the same people wouldn't be winnable. Lets say this guy wasn't just the winner of the tourney who they bumped into on the road, but the winner of the tourney who had killed one of the PCs best friends and who they were out for revenge on (but who didn't know that about them) - that makes this much more likely to be a combat encounter. Now there's actually an implicit goal, and it's to put this guy down if at all possible. Even in that situation, that doesn't make the PCs decision ending in death a case of bad design. Knowing that the guy was extremely dangerous puts them in a position to take that into account for a fight, and even if this fight was unwinnable something like a night ambush that starts with picking off the guards then lighting the knight's tent on fire while they sleep while outside of it in full kit may well have been winnable.

As far as outlandish damage goes, it's a fight consisting of people running straight at each other with lances. This is a combat type that is immediately recognizable as the sort that does a lot of damage to one person all at once.

If you put a duelist in front of your players, and one of them is a duelist, expect a duel. If that duelist will 100% kill your players if they duel, you've put in a mousetrap, not a good encounter.

There's a few things here. One is that this wouldn't be expected of a lot of duelists, plenty of them are likely to avoid duels that they can't lose. The second is that duelists who will get in duels pretty nonchalantly when they aren't to the death are still likely to be much more cautious about duels to the death. We're not talking about a rapier duel to first blood that ended in the PC dead here, we're talking about a type of dueling which is made nonlethal by not putting a point on the weapon involved and still going in in extremely heavy armor. The mechanics almost certainly reflect that.

This encounter is bad because it takes a likely and frankly pretty reasonable solution to the obstacle, and makes it kill you out of nowhere. That kind of red herring encounter design is good in iterative gameplay, where you're expected to lose and lose and lose, and come back again looking at the encounter in unique ways. But that's not the case here. The player doesn't get to respawn with the knowledge of how lethal this knight really is and work a different angle. Instead they just lost, and all of their stuff was stolen and they feel bad. They don't learn to solve encounters through methods other than combat. They learn to be scared of doing to wrong thing in your encounters.
(quick side note, this isn't even combat. It's a joust. It already has a fail state that isn't death. It's losing the joust)
If you really want your players to explore solutions that aren't combat, you need to give them incentive. There are better consequences than player death. Maybe if you hadn't randomly killed that knight on the road and befriended him instead, you'd have a much easier time trying to talk to the king.

What obstacle? The knight isn't in their way. The knight isn't an enemy. On top of that there are a bunch of good reasons to have an encounter* that aren't a fight. That it's not an obstacle takes the approach outside of the realm of solutions all on its lonesome. As for whether or not it's reasonable, the approach consisted of picking a needless one on one fair duel with an enemy that was telegraphed as extremely dangerous. It's a dumb decision, and while it may well be a good decision in character that the player deserves credit for making that doesn't somehow mean that the ending was unreasonable.

On a different note, I routinely create encounters where a direct fight is a great way to get killed, but where the opposition actually is an obstacle. Yet PC death is extremely rare in my games - I suspect that the average is less than 1 PC per campaign, and that average is heavily skewed by a couple of outliers where the death count is entirely on the PCs working against each other in large part because that's what that particular group of players likes doing. As just one example, one session of a game I was running where the PCs were a space mercenary group involved being contracted by a mining corporation to recover some highly valuable missing cargo. Said cargo was in fact so valuable that some space pirates had built an improvised space station around it by connecting three warships in a triangle around the box then building from there, while constantly trying to bypass the boxes defenses so that it could be transported without destroying the precious cargo. The players had a fairly light ship roughly equivalent to a fighter squadron. I'm sure if they had gone in guns blazing and gotten killed then that would be presented as bad encounter design too. Instead they went in pretending to be pirates, earned the trust of the pirates running it, got access to the ship's jump drive systems and box security, then convinced the pirates that a naval fleet was incoming and they had to warp out now. The pirates warped out, and the PCs then spent the precious time of their warp drive recharging taking all the cargo and warping away. It ended with them taking the last piece of cargo into their ship and jumping out just in time to dodge the incoming missiles of the pirate fortress after it had recharged and warped back, and was one of the more memorable encounters in the game. I'd count that as a success. Every player counts it as a success. Yet it was all only possible by using encounter design that makes certain approaches extremely likely to be fatal. It was capable of killing out of nowhere pretty comparably to the knight encounter, it just ended differently and provides a different story from the result.

*In the sense of running into something significant enough to be worth commenting on.

[John Longarrow]

The point is, the player was presented with an obstacle and tried a solution. Instead of being given an honest attempt with their solution, they immediately failed and were killed. All because the DM didn't want them trying that solution. If this were reversed, about trying a noncombat solution when the DM wanted a fight, how many would say the encounter was bad?

You do realize that you just self-identified as a murderhobo, right? This was a chance encounter on the road, not an "obstacle". If you treat every person you meet and have a chance to interact with as an "obstacle" and assume combat is a viable way to deal with said "obstacle" I don't think your looking for a role playing game. You may be more interested in something like Warhammer of another wargame.

[TheCountAlucard]

Incidentally, one of my games has some pretty high-powered PCs (one in particular can be pretty reasonably compared to Heracles from the Greek myths), but they still know better than to try to resolve all their encounters with stand-there-and-trade-blows-until-one-side-is-dead combat.

It helps that they're on a ship, mind. If the ship sinks more than a certain distance from the shore, their chances ain't pretty.

[hymer]

So by this logic the world should never have more powerful NPC's than the PC's. Because if the PC's should bump into them and decide to fight them for no reason at all they could lose?

You also need to lower mountain ranges and temple towers if any of the PCs has points in Climb, or make them roguher and easier to climb. But they can grow gradually in height and smoothness over the campaign, except if that PC is injured. Then you must lower them again, so s/he can climb them with little to no risk.

Seriously, there's almost bound to be stuff out there that can kill the PCs, particularly in such specialized ways as the OP tells us about. Players who seek out danger with little or no discrimination are liable to get their PCs in trouble, and eventually killed. That's what's supposed to happen. Knowing when to back down is an important skill, and being gung-ho carries risks. If there are no consequences to your actions, your actions mean nothing.

[hamishspence]

You do realize that you just self-identified as a murderhobo, right? This was a chance encounter on the road, not an "obstacle".

Indeed. Whether it was the kudos of "defeating a great tourney champion" or "the possibility of winning gear" that motivated the challenge - the knight had himself done nothing to be challenged for.

[Yukitsu]

Are you seriously suggesting that there's a certain class out there that challenges *everybody* with a sword/bow/lance they encounter to a fight? That the only type of encounter possible with said class is combat?

Duelist not as a class, no. Duelist as a profession in the world however, are what they are because they challenge people to duels, fight in tournements, get in fights to gain more fame and prestige etc. etc. And they aren't going to challenge someone that doesn't fight duels to one, so it is certainly possible in theory for them to have other encounters. Duelists didn't exactly go out of their way to go duel a duck for example.

[hamishspence]

In a world as dangerous as D&D, "tourneys" may be less a competitive sport, and more "training for war/monster fighting". Thus, the fact that this person won a tournament, does not mean their career is "jousting".

As such, they may not be a duelist themselves - and may not like being challenged, outside of tourneys - and thus, act accordingly - doing as much damage as they can to their challenger.

[thirdkingdom]

Duelist not as a class, no. Duelist as a profession in the world however, are what they are because they challenge people to duels, fight in tournements, get in fights to gain more fame and prestige etc. etc. And they aren't going to challenge someone that doesn't fight duels to one, so it is certainly possible in theory for them to have other encounters. Duelists didn't exactly go out of their way to go duel a duck for example.

Protip: The best way to livend a long time as a duelist*? Don't pick fights with every Tom, **** and Harry you see.

*Also applicable to adventurers, which was kinda the point of the OP.

[Yukitsu]

Protip: The best way to livend a long time as a duelist*? Don't pick fights with every Tom, **** and Harry you see.

*Also applicable to adventurers, which was kinda the point of the OP.

You're not going to be a very famous duelist with that kind of attitude, you may as well go plant turnips instead.

I'm not even being that sarcastic here. There are people who fight hundreds of duels either against people at the top of the profession and against many, many people trying to prove they can beat him. You can't really earn any renown as a duelist if you only fight weaklings.

[The Extinguisher]

Please, I haven't advocated for random murder being a solution for everything. I haven't said that challenge shouldn't exist, or that consequences for poor decisions are bad. My whole argument is that putting mousetraps in front of your players is bad design. Encouraging your players to do something that will only get them killed is bad design. Punishing your players instead of creating consequences is bad design.

This is a game. This is a not a real world populated by real people, things needs to be placed intentionally in the world in real time for them to exist. Whether or not combat is an option, the knight is still put in front of the players. They are doing something, and the encounter interrupts what they were doing. In order to continue, they need to resolve the encounter with the knight. That's an obstacle. What else would you call it. Resolving the encounter could me killing the knight, passing by without a word, convincing the knight that their lord is corrupt, or helping the knight bring someone to justice. But the encounter still needs to be resolved for the story/game to continue, so the knight is an obstacle to continuing the story/game.

There are certainly times where rushing head on into combat is a bad idea. There are also times where trying to talk your way out of something is a bad idea. This is fine. It's okay. Unless you've spent the whole game reinforcing that one particular solution will always work and is the best way to solve things, only to make one encounter where it isn't. Then it's bad. But I'm not even going to assume that's the case because it's typically much more extreme then what you'll find in tabletop games (think of a call of duty type game where in one level you lose if you shoot people). You can enforce consequences when your players do decide to make a bad idea. But you can do that without punishing your players. Give them a chance. A small one, sure, and they need to be smart about it. But giving players options that will always fail is bad. If you don't want them to shoot their way out, take away their guns.

Moving back to the original encounter:
-> It's reasonable to expect that the player that carries a lance and rides around on a horse jousts. It's also reasonable to expect that upon meeting a famous jouster, if the player thinks highly of their abilities they would challenge them to a round.
-> If the player is not supposed to joust the knight, don't let them. Why would a knight accept a challenge from some random on the road who doesn't even have the proper gear? The knight is hot of winning the award for Best at Jousting, he doesn't need to prove himself. The knight practically jumps at the challenge, offering no reason why they shouldn't because the knight is one who creates the terms for the joust. By doing this, you are telling your player that winning is possible.
-> But winning isn't possible. It's easy to do a lot of damage charging with a lance. But the best I can work out, without taking action to be extra lethal, a particularly strong knight is going to 45 damage on a maxed out roll. Which is more than enough to kill the player anyway. I can't for the life of me figure out how to innately get that extra forty damage without making him strong enough to pick up a car like it was a baby. Why does the knight do this much damage? Is it necessary?
-> More to the point, you want your player to face consequences for needlessly challenging people. The joust already had pretty high stakes. The player loses the joust roll and now they lose all of their stuff.

My point seems to have gotten away from everyone (including myself really). This isn't about combat, or player death or anything. It's about not leading players into traps. About not punishing players when they try something you didn't want them to. And about creating encounters that are appropriate to the players, both in terms of difficulty and in approach.

[Telok]

The point is, the player was presented with an obstacle and tried a solution. Instead of being given an honest attempt with their solution, they immediately failed and were killed. All because the DM didn't want them trying that solution. If this were reversed, about trying a noncombat solution when the DM wanted a fight, how many would say the encounter was bad?

Here's your issue, treating everything like a combat encounter.

I've seen it go the other way too where the NPCs involved were weaker than the PCs. The party came across two groups fighting, one demonic and the other was just normal people. The intent was for the PCs to kill off the demonic guys and get help and info from the normal people. Instead one of the combat-only players just nuked the whole area with a spell and killed everything on the first round. The party got no XP (no challenge in just killing everything), and the 'loot' was aid and information which got nuked along with the people.

It's often not about how the DM wants players to "solve" an encounter. Some DMs don't set up encounters to be solved, they're just things that happen. You meet a wandering knight, see a dragon in the distance, bump into a sphinx, find two people fighting each other, or run into a merchant with a broken wagon wheel. The DM doesn't have to scrip an outcome, I generally don't because that doesn't work. The DM defines a situation and how the NPCs in that situation react. If there's a script the NPCs react to force the script, if the NPCs have personalities and goals then the NPCs react in accordance to those.

[thirdkingdom]

You're not going to be a very famous duelist with that kind of attitude, you may as well go plant turnips instead.

I'm not even being that sarcastic here. There are people who fight hundreds of duels either against people at the top of the profession and against many, many people trying to prove they can beat him. You can't really earn any renown as a duelist if you only fight weaklings.

Seriously, dude? Your only alternative to "attack everything you see" is to become a farmer?

[Yukitsu]

Seriously, dude? Your only alternative to "attack everything you see" is to become a farmer?

Fight every other duelist. Especially ones that are extremely good. I think you missed a major part of what I mentioned earlier.

[Vinyadan]

You're not going to be a very famous duelist with that kind of attitude, you may as well go plant turnips instead.

I'm not even being that sarcastic here. There are people who fight hundreds of duels either against people at the top of the profession and against many, many people trying to prove they can beat him. You can't really earn any renown as a duelist if you only fight weaklings.

I am now curious to see how many challenges boxe champions accept.

In general, a sportsman tries to avoid accepting challenges from lesser opponents, if they can cost him too much (even in case of victory). Some time ago a player from Germany complained about a Germany-S. Marino match, because he saw it as just dangerous for the players and ultimately useless. If I were a man looking for fame & glory as a swordsman, and already in good standing in my discipline, I would avoid fighting some unknown guy I probably could kill in a minute, but who might still manage to hurt my eye or cut my knee, because I would have nothing to gain from the match, only to lose. Now, if an equal opponent appears? Sure, let's roll. (I guess that in boxing the limiting factors are the recovery time after the match and the preparation before the next one).

I think that's what thirdkingdom meant when saying not to fight people of no note.

[The Extinguisher]

Here's your issue, treating everything like a combat encounter.

I've seen it go the other way too where the NPCs involved were weaker than the PCs. The party came across two groups fighting, one demonic and the other was just normal people. The intent was for the PCs to kill off the demonic guys and get help and info from the normal people. Instead one of the combat-only players just nuked the whole area with a spell and killed everything on the first round. The party got no XP (no challenge in just killing everything), and the 'loot' was aid and information which got nuked along with the people.

It's often not about how the DM wants players to "solve" an encounter. Some DMs don't set up encounters to be solved, they're just things that happen. You meet a wandering knight, see a dragon in the distance, bump into a sphinx, find two people fighting each other, or run into a merchant with a broken wagon wheel. The DM doesn't have to scrip an outcome, I generally don't because that doesn't work. The DM defines a situation and how the NPCs in that situation react. If there's a script the NPCs react to force the script, if the NPCs have personalities and goals then the NPCs react in accordance to those.

We posted at the same time, so I'm guessing you missed this. But every situation that is placed in front of the players is done so intentionally. This isn't real life where things just happen. This isn't even an open world video game where all the components of the world are predetermined and you run into them where they happen. The encounter interrupts the continuation of the narrative or gamestate (even if it's in service of the narrative or gamestate). It must be resolved to continue the narrative or gamestate. Sometimes it's a simple as the DM describe where the dragon in the distance is going and continuing on.

[thirdkingdom]

We posted at the same time, so I'm guessing you missed this. But every situation that is placed in front of the players is done so intentionally. isn't real life where things just happen. This isn't even an open world video game where all the components of the world are predetermined and you run into them where they happen. The encounter interrupts the continuation of the narrative or gamestate (even if it's in service of the narrative or gamestate). It must be resolved to continue the narrative or gamestate. Sometimes it's a simple as the DM describe where the dragon in the distance is going and continuing

The bolded part of your statement is not true. Pre 3e versions of D&D, for example, rely heavily on the use of random encounters.

[Velaryon]

The players had already been warned that they are not the top dogs in the setting and the high bounty should've tipped them off Krogar was no wimp, but I suppose the green-eyed monster got to them. Safe to say, they got their butts soundly trounced by a highlevel werebear barbarian. Luckily for them, turned out Krogar is actually a decent guy, albeit a bit obsessed with fighting, and got most of his 'infamy' for getting on the wrong side of some powerful, evil rulers.

While a lot of players would regard the high bounty as a tip off, I think the crimes he was wanted for could have conveyed the message a little more powerfully. Instead of being wanted for murder, he could have been wanted for killing six members of the city watch at once, or killing a couatl that was sacred to the local church of <insert deity>, or something like that which gives the players a more concrete frame of reference.

Spoiler: Metaphor comparing RPG encounters to work, spoilered for length

Show

Imagine you're at work.

Some VIP comes in, drags you into a meeting for whatever reason and starts talking and giving out orders. Nothing you can say will get them to change their minds as you're an entry level (or just above that) scrub, unless it's a very radical or revolutionary idea, and even then you fear of speaking out and embarrassing yourself or angering them because it could potentially cost you your job. And you can't deke out of there. They're at that level of VIP. All you can really do is sit there, listen to their monologue and bob your head like a dashboard chihuahua.

Bravo, you've just met the High Level NPC Encounter IRL. Was that fun? Was that a meaningful encounter? Was your work session made better because of it (I guess in one hand you got out of work, but on the other you're behind on what you were currently working on)? Was this so revolutionary that you feel the need to impart this experience onto your friends in their game of magical dwarves and elves?

Likely not.

This is the main issue I find when it comes to dealing with large power discrepancies between PC and NPCs and I try to avoid this when possible when GMing: Higher level NPCs, esp. in games like D&D with it's scaling, usually have abilities or defenses that make mechanical interaction near impossible.

You kinda just have to sit there, bob your head and wait for the GM to finish narrating stuff so you can continue to actually interact with the game world in a meaningful way. Or the GM has failed to properly let you know that his is a thing you shouldn't interact with and get killed because "realism".

I work nearly 50 hours a week doing tech support. All I want to do is pretend I'm a magical elf in a somewhat consistent heroic world. If I cared for realism, I'd go running in the snow outside.

and I probably wouldn't be playing a magical elf.

The office encounter you've described, in which the VIP drags you into a meeting then bosses you around for an extended period of time, is more analogous to using a high-level NPC to railroad the party into a quest. The scenario presented involved the PC's encountering the VIP passing through the office, then challenging him in front of his employees to a competition that the VIP is known to be proficient at. VIP replies that he's unable to do this for play, but that he will put his job on the line against the other employee's. Party member accepts this risk, is humiliated and loses his job while his coworkers look on in awkward silence.

You say that you don't care about realism in the game, and that's perfectly valid. But extending this office metaphor a little further, wouldn't it be a little weird if you went into work and you never encountered managers, VP's, or anyone ranked higher than you until you were promoted to their level?

This encounter is bad because it takes a likely and frankly pretty reasonable solution to the obstacle, and makes it kill you out of nowhere. That kind of red herring encounter design is good in iterative gameplay, where you're expected to lose and lose and lose, and come back again looking at the encounter in unique ways. But that's not the case here. The player doesn't get to respawn with the knowledge of how lethal this knight really is and work a different angle. Instead they just lost, and all of their stuff was stolen and they feel bad. They don't learn to solve encounters through methods other than combat. They learn to be scared of doing to wrong thing in your encounters.
(quick side note, this isn't even combat. It's a joust. It already has a fail state that isn't death. It's losing the joust)
If you really want your players to explore solutions that aren't combat, you need to give them incentive. There are better consequences than player death. Maybe if you hadn't randomly killed that knight on the road and befriended him instead, you'd have a much easier time trying to talk to the king.

The point is, the player was presented with an obstacle and tried a solution. Instead of being given an honest attempt with their solution, they immediately failed and were killed. All because the DM didn't want them trying that solution. If this were reversed, about trying a noncombat solution when the DM wanted a fight, how many would say the encounter was bad?

What obstacle? They met an NPC on the road who they heard was a pretty tough dude and decided to challenge him to a fight because he was there. He wasn't blocking their way, or threatening them or impeding their progress on a quest, he was just there. For all we know, OP was expecting them to try to make a friend, or get some information, or buy a magic item off of the knight. He tried to hint that the knight was above their pay grade without breaking character outright by saying "dude, this isn't a good idea."

For a game where literally everything is just there to be killed, why not just play Grand Theft Auto?

[Esprit15]

Are we ignoring the part where the knight warns the guy that this will be lethal combat? I feel like that was the DM warning the player IC that this would be dangerous.

As for damage, Just spirited charge, possibly shock trooper (level six seems reasonable for him) easily gets to 60 damage, more on an above average roll.

[thirdkingdom]

Are we ignoring the part where the knight warns the guy that this will be lethal combat? I feel like that was the DM warning the player IC that this would be dangerous.

As for damage, Just spirited charge, possibly shock trooper (level six seems reasonable for him) easily gets to 60 damage, more on an above average roll.

Yeah, that's an "are you sure you want to do this?" if I've ever heard one.