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

[Ruslan]

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.

Knight: "I don't carry my tourney lance with me."
Player: "Excuses already?"
Knight: "No excuses, I'm just saying, my lance is a combat weapon. Not the blunted one I use for tourneys."
Player: "Haha, what a coincidence, so is mine!"
Knight: "If risk of fatality is to be accepted, I must have an incentive to fight. Winner takes loser's gear?"
Player: "Hell yeah!"

They get on their horses, charge each other, knight wins initiative and deals 85 damage. The PC only had 30-something hit points. The knight promptly proceeds to undress the dead PC, take all his gear and money as the rest of the party is too scared to intervene, and rides away, dropping a small purse with 10 gp.

"Funeral expenses."

[Geddy2112]

I love when this kind of thing happens. Good on the player for only putting his character up for ante. Far too many times the foolish actions of one get the whole party killed.

But if they want to play dumb, and only they will die...let em have it!

[JeenLeen]

While funny as a story, I think at the actual table the DM should warn the player that this is not necessarily a combat encounter. I recall that, when my group stopped playing D&D and moved to oWoD, it took us a while to figure out that we shouldn't just kill folk who attack us and that an enemy base is not necessarily the next target to attack. (Didn't realize killing gang members in broad daylight in the bad side of town was stupid, then took us a while to figure out we shouldn't just storm the Technocrat base. Fortunately, figured out the latter before we tried it.)

I think the DM should make sure players understand what is the case in a game, especially if the assumption is that things are level-appropriate.

I guess I'm agreeing with Geddy2112's comment, if the player is really putting his character up for ante and not working on false assumptions. (But definite yay that only the one PC was harmed and not drag the party down with it.)

[Grac]

That'll learn 'em.

I'm fine with doing that sort of thing when I know it's not winnable. I try to push the old school sensibilities towards exploration and negotiation and retreat, but myself, I Leroy Jenkins all the time
:D

[Yukitsu]

When I do it? My DM sort of gets that thousand mile stare and starts re-writing notes. I have a knack for surviving really hard encounters.

[Esprit15]

Good on the player for accepting the risk.

Can't say I've had the same problem. Ive actually had players die in fights against encounters they were should have laughed through. Once had an assassin take a job to kill a mage who was the main weapons guy for a rival gang. Literally just an old warmage, two levels under him, maybe a few more, with nothing but item creation feats. Guy fails every check to notice that the mage is onto him, sneaks into his house, gets grappled by tentacles, and is eventually killed by a orb of electricity.

Gotta give props to players who only get their own characters killed, rather than the rest of the party.

[SilverLeaf167]

I'm playing in a Pathfinder game with the Kingmaker module (no spoilers beyond the minor ones I mention here, please!). Our very first encounter a few sessions back consisted of us ambushing a bunch of bandits coming to extort protection money from a trading post. We had some bad luck, but pulled through in the end. Thing is, one of the bandits ended up escaping, and we assumed we'd be screwed if he alerted his allies.

So we gave chase.

Y'see, we didn't realize it at the time, but Kingmaker is a pretty unusual module. It's a sandbox that actively expects the party to seek out random encounters for MMO-style grinding, even when there are more immediate concerns. With no other clear plot hooks, we made the entirely reasonable assumption that we should follow the fleeing bandit.
Long story short, we ran directly into the apparent "mid-boss" of the chapter, another group of bandits definitely not designed for our level 1 party. We only barely scraped by because my Alchemist, the last man standing, chugged a Dexterity-boosting mutagen and a Shield extract, a marvelous maneuver we dubbed "Protocol Hammer". You know, because nothing but a natural 20 could touch AC 23 at that level?

After a long duel between myself and the bandit leader (plus the Paladin who briefly woke up only to get off-handedly critted into a coma), involving a lot of close calls, napalm and close calls with napalm, the battle was finally won with a clutch arrow through the leader's armpit one round before my Shield fizzled.

We made almost the exact same mistake two sessions later. I think we're very slowly figuring out how to approach Kingmaker. Protocol Hammer remains a panic button I have yet to use again, but one I'm definitely keeping ready.

[Noje]

That is a fantastically well executed encounter! there are ways to make unbalanced encounters fun and feel fair, and I think you hit it right on the nose. The player was told the risk in character and had the option to back out, the list goes on. This gets full marks in my book!

[Freed]

I reccomend you have that player come back as a zombie and eat that knight's head off.

[Tzonarin]

I had a couple of these when I was DMing a game. PC's got upset with me on more than one occasion.

This is an interesting question - do we level every encounter to what the party will face or do we look at reality, such as sometimes, you have really really easy encounters (level 20 party finds a small group of kobolds in the cave) or really really hard ones (level 1 party happens across an adult dragon with a growl in its stomach).



But then, there is this point - the DM has to sometimes fix the encounters, because at the end of the day, if the players are not having fun with the game, then the game has failed, no matter how close to reality it may be.

DM has to play this based on the party.

Tzo

[Yukitsu]

I had a couple of these when I was DMing a game. PC's got upset with me on more than one occasion.

This is an interesting question - do we level every encounter to what the party will face or do we look at reality, such as sometimes, you have really really easy encounters (level 20 party finds a small group of kobolds in the cave) or really really hard ones (level 1 party happens across an adult dragon with a growl in its stomach).

The problem I have with high, high power encounters is that if I can't meaningfully interact with them, why are they even in the game? It's just you talking at me about things that I'm not supposed to do anything about. You could have skipped it to something that's interesting or that I could actually do something about instead of wasting 10 minutes talking about that jouster that I can't possibly beat. (not that I think the OP really did that or that I'd really mind that much)

Similarly, you wouldn't want to litter the world with low levels since they get back hand slapped and you end up just wasting the time of the group.

They both can be interesting for setting up some sort of tone to the world or emphasize some kind of narrative point or to show players they're in a place they don't need to be in anymore, but when overused, both over and under powered encounters are a negative experience for the party and I personally hate it when they're in the world just to add "realism" to it.

Think about it this way: The party probably saw dozens of people along the road, and almost none of them warranted the DM commenting on it. If the players can't actually do anything relevant to the jouster, I wouldn't feel it necessary to even mention it since the only thing it can do is bait a player into getting their character killed.

A lot of people on the other hand love this kind of thing (almost all that vocally advocate for it are DMs though), but this is just me going and answering what the worst that can happen is.


vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv
Sorry, but I almost get the feeling you didn't even read the entire post, nor the one I was responding to.

[Ruslan]

The problem I have with high, high power encounters is that if I can't meaningfully interact with them, why are they even in the game? <snip> Think about it this way: The party probably saw dozens of people along the road, and almost none of them warranted the DM commenting on it. If the players can't actually do anything relevant to the jouster, I wouldn't feel it necessary to even mention it since the only thing it can do is bait a player into getting their character killed.

If I would think about it this way, I would be thinking wrong.

You seem to use "interact" as a synonym for "fight", or otherwise engage in numeric interplay, when side A compares its statistics to side B, with some random numbers added for a good measure, and an outcome is thus created.

If we take a slightly less narrow view of the word 'interact', we can immediately see that, indeed, they could interact with him in a variety of ways. They could ask for the latest court gossip. They could ask about his travels. They could flatter him on his victory, so that the next time he saw them, he would remember them and put a good word for them at court. They could share the story of their own travels, possibly pointing out places of interest. They could fed him with false information, hoping to lead him into a trap with the intent to loot his corpse later. Speaking of fighting, they could have attacked him all together (he was decidedly stronger than any individual party member, of course, but not decidedly stronger than all of them together, especially if taken by surprise). Or, they could have just ignored him and be on their way.

To say that the 'only thing it can do is bait a player into getting their character killed' is an extremely narrow view of the situation.

[John Longarrow]

As a DM, I allow players to interact with characters above and below their character level for many reasons. Most of them are not combat related though. As a DM, I'd use a character much as outlined above for one of several reasons all of which the players can choose from; Quest giver, source of information, patron to impress, rich traveler to trade with, or just RP encounter for the fun of it.

If the players want to interact, fine. If they don't, fine. Trying to make him "CR appropriate" for a fight though, only if it seems like it would make sense in game.

In game I've had players encounter what would otherwise be a BBEG traveling along a road and just talk to them. No fight even though the BBEG screamed "Bad guy" because it was pretty obvious he had the deck stacked in his favor. The players were able to get info from him regarding the mission they were on so it worked out well.

If they'd have attacked him odds are they wouldn't all have walked away.. at least not as living beings. That said, if I'd changed it to be a level appropriate encounter after a fight started the players would have felt let down.

[Professor Chimp]

Stories like that are always fun.

I've had a similar one when my players (~lv 7-8 at the time) decided to take up some bounty hunting to pass the time while they were having some new gear crafted. I had prepared a number of bounties suitable for a wide variety of party levels, all of which were available. Of course, my players didn't know that and cocky as they were, they chose to go after the one with the highest pay-off: a 50.000gp barbarian named Krogar wanted for a laundry list of crimes, including murder, pillaging, theft, the rape of several noble ladies, and public urinating.

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.

[Stealth Marmot]

"Funeral expenses."

[Grod_The_Giant]

The problem I have with high, high power encounters is that if I can't meaningfully interact with them, why are they even in the game? It's just you talking at me about things that I'm not supposed to do anything about. You could have skipped it to something that's interesting or that I could actually do something about instead of wasting 10 minutes talking about that jouster that I can't possibly beat. (not that I think the OP really did that or that I'd really mind that much)

That's one more downside, especially prevalent in open worlds, that I feel doesn't get discussed often enough: player paranoia. A little caution is one thing, but too many unwinnable encounters, GMs boasting about how "killer" they are, or both can lead to players who are afraid to do anything. Games where players argue and discuss and plan for hours before biting at any plot hook because they're afraid it's a trap are no fun-- not for the players, and not for GMs.

My approach is usually "whatever you do, I'll try to make it interesting. Every encounter will have a win condition somewhere, though it won't necessarily be through violence. I won't surprise you with death traps, and I'll try to find a way to warn you if you're creating one for yourself*. And even if things go wrong, losses will progress the story as well as victories will-- I won't just dump <large scary thing> on you and walk away."



*As in "your character would know that a noble house will have about ten times as many soldiers on hand as you're thinking, Bob."

[Jormengand]

I usually allow players a chance to back down in the case of them trying to fight someone they shouldn't.

"Yes, the paladin that your third-level party is trying to fight casts a third-level sanctified spell and grows wings of blazing fiery death. Do you wish to continue?"

And just because he's way stronger than them doesn't mean that he's immune to, say, being talked to.

[PhoenixPhyre]

I mostly DM 5e for teenagers (as the faculty advisor for a D&D club at a high school). Most of them have no experience with TTRPGs and have only played MMOs and CRPGs. At the beginning of each year (when I have new players) I try to introduce a few "encounters" to try to drive home the point that this is not a world conveniently leveled for them.

This year I had two: a wyvern and a Dire Sasquatch (refluffed from an abominable yeti).

The wyvern attacked a caravan they were guarding (at level 1) with the intent of taking one of the oxen. That one was specifically designed to hurt somebody badly but not kill them before they drove it off. I ran this with 3 separate groups (2 teenagers and one adult group) as part of their first session:
Group 1 firebolted it as soon as they saw it. It ran after hitting the dwarven fighter with a tail spike, dropping him to 0 HP. The cleric metagamed a bit (knowing he'd have 3 death saves) and spent a round berating the wizard for attacking it on sight. The fighter failed his first save, then the cleric went. On his second turn unconscious, the fighter rolled a 1. Oops. We ended up retconning that second turn as a vision of the future.
Group 2 ran around in panic. One person got knocked to 0, but they brought him up immediately. The first death save was a 1, though. The dice were being evil that day.
The adult group instead cut one ox free and sent it off as bait. None of them got hurt.

The Dire Sasquatch was hibernating in a cave. Not particularly part of the quest, just a cave in a forest. They were level 2 at this point, the beast was CR 9.
Group 1: The dragonborn paladin decides to go running into the cave without any precautions. Fails his perception check (badly). Spends 3 rounds yelling at the beast as I describe this big man-like creature slowly getting up, stretching, licking huge lips, and staring very hungrily at him. Refuses to run. The rest of the group (except for one rogue) milled about at the entrance, not doing much. After 3 turns, the sasquatch swats the paladin. Does 2x HP - 1 (ie 1 more damage and he'd auto-die). The rogue grabs the body and tries to drag him out. At this point I bent the rules a little bit and had the attack of opportunity hit the paladin instead of the rogue. This hit did something like 3x his max HP. I then described the beast loudly and messily crunching through the armor and bones of their party member. The rest of them ran.
Group 2: They were more cautious, but one monk tried to talk to it and got punched. Didn't take him out (rolled low for damage). They ran. The warlock had repelling blast and slowed it down.
Adults: Sneaked into the cave, saw the beast, and ran without really waking it up.

I've thrown in a few other NPCs who would have destroyed them in a fight, but they've been smart enough not to attack or be hostile.

[Quertus]

The problem I have with high, high power encounters is that if I can't meaningfully interact with them, why are they even in the game?

Fortunately for my signature character, every dragon he has ever encountered (usually by himself, and usually way over his CR) in point of fact has read his book. He's gotten a lot of feedback from "randomly" encountering dragons on dozens of worlds.

Personally, I love for the world to feel alive, to not feel custom tailored to the PCs (unless, of course, it actually is custom tailored to the PCs, such as by being their collective dream or something). I love helping build player skills, like old-school games used to rely on. And I love experiencing as diverse an array of encounters as possible.

So, yeah, so long as I have the option to attempt to interact with it meaningfully, and it isn't just a railroaded set piece, I'm all for CR-inappropriate encounters.

[Yukitsu]

Fortunately for my signature character, every dragon he has ever encountered (usually by himself, and usually way over his CR) in point of fact has read his book. He's gotten a lot of feedback from "randomly" encountering dragons on dozens of worlds.

Personally, I love for the world to feel alive, to not feel custom tailored to the PCs (unless, of course, it actually is custom tailored to the PCs, such as by being their collective dream or something). I love helping build player skills, like old-school games used to rely on. And I love experiencing as diverse an array of encounters as possible.

So, yeah, so long as I have the option to attempt to interact with it meaningfully, and it isn't just a railroaded set piece, I'm all for CR-inappropriate encounters.

While I kind of agree, I also find those situations really immersion shattering rather than the opposite. To me, it's almost incomprehensible that a CR 20 dragon would even bother looking at a CR 1 adventurer. Maybe accidental, awkward eye contact at most.

Even at a lower scale, a nobleman isn't going to really going to bother giving the time of day to some random guy that walks up to him on the road, there were people who's literal job was to shoo people away from their lord's carriage because they didn't want to converse with the lower classes or have such obstacles slowing their journey. If this guy is not only someone of importance, but is also strong enough that he can just ignore a random adventurer, it makes far more sense to me that they would and similarly, unless your party is someone who has equal social status to this guy or similar social status, they should probably know that there isn't really any point conversing with someone of that sort of status.

Now maybe a high level adventurer could walk by and maybe feel compelled to give some pointers or otherwise talk to the group but most of my worlds don't have a huge number of adventurers and especially not ones that are higher level than the party. Other than that, a lot of the examples that people give of this simply feel like they break my immersion, not reinforce the world as a "real" place.

The OP example is fine though on the other hand, it's not that I feel the jouster was way out of their league, it's just that the character opted to give that NPC every advantage he could have.

[Ruslan]

It's true that a dragon is unlikely to engage in exhilarating conversation with a low-level guy, but still, even then, interaction is possible, even if something like this:

DM: "You see a dragon flying overhead."
PCs: "We hide!"
DM: "It flies away."
PCs: "Whew."

One may, again, say it's meaningless, but think how much better the memory of this little moment makes them feel when 12 levels later they slay that same dragon! Running away from X and later being able to defeat X is a kind of measure of character growth.

[Slipperychicken]

The best part is, this sort of thing happens all the time in Arthurian legend. Some random dude bumps into one of the bigwig round table knights on the road, insists on challenging him for some huge stakes, and then gets annihilated.

I think it's good to shake players out of the mindset that they can fight and kill everything they see for a good fun challenge. Though if you do that you should reasonably signpost the relevant threat levels, and be prepared for them to start refusing quests or looking for alternative approaches when things get tough.

[Vinyadan]

I guess you could say, "what happens when you think every encounter is a match".

[oxybe]

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.

[Vitruviansquid]

As much as I enjoy the idea of this, it occurs to me that what happens when you show your players everything isn't level-appropriate encounters is they'll start to prepare for everything as if they are level-inappropriate encounters.

And I can't think of very much that would be worse for me as a GM than that.

[Psikerlord]

Low Fantasy Gaming RPG uses random encounter tables that are set by geographical location, with no reference to PC level. It also has a formal "Party Retreat" rule, allowing players the option of (very probably) disengaging from a battle at a cost. So "Level appropriate" encounters doesnt really exist. The adventurers encounter what they encounter, and the players decide whether to talk, fight, run or something else :)

[RazorChain]

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.

Well I beg to differ, mechanical interaction is just a fraction of the game unless you are constantly rolling dice.

You can be the deadliest swordsman in the world but that doesn't mean people are going to listen to you. Social power and personal power are two very distinct things, the king might be a lazy slob who can't do anything in a fight but the PC's should probably not disrespect him in his own house.

DnD has a very high power discrepancy compared to most other systems and therefore the PC's in lot of other systems aren't picking fights needlessly.

[thirdkingdom]

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.

Knight: "I don't carry my tourney lance with me."
Player: "Excuses already?"
Knight: "No excuses, I'm just saying, my lance is a combat weapon. Not the blunted one I use for tourneys."
Player: "Haha, what a coincidence, so is mine!"
Knight: "If risk of fatality is to be accepted, I must have an incentive to fight. Winner takes loser's gear?"
Player: "Hell yeah!"

They get on their horses, charge each other, knight wins initiative and deals 85 damage. The PC only had 30-something hit points. The knight promptly proceeds to undress the dead PC, take all his gear and money as the rest of the party is too scared to intervene, and rides away, dropping a small purse with 10 gp.

"Funeral expenses."

I think this is great, and am also of the opinion that the game world should be a living, dynamic place where the PCs decide what is a "Level Appropriate Encounter". Good DMs leave clues (such as the fact that the knight won the King's jousting tournament), good players pick up on said clues.

One of the reasons I enjoy OSR games is because of the use of the Reaction Roll, which means that not every encounter -- in fact, fewer than half of all random encounters -- will end up in hostilities. If you go in with the mindset that "encounter" means "fight", than of course this is not the sort of game you'd want to play in.

[Knaight]

That's one more downside, especially prevalent in open worlds, that I feel doesn't get discussed often enough: player paranoia. A little caution is one thing, but too many unwinnable encounters, GMs boasting about how "killer" they are, or both can lead to players who are afraid to do anything. Games where players argue and discuss and plan for hours before biting at any plot hook because they're afraid it's a trap are no fun-- not for the players, and not for GMs.

This is more an argument for telegraphing danger than anything. In the story in the OP the character in question had just explicitly won the king's jousting tournament. Other comparably obvious examples I've seen was a player who decided it was a good idea to get into a dogfight with a small strike craft, while they had a jetpack and a rifle - after provoking said fight by engaging in an act of fairly unsubtle sabotage on a critical part of the planetary geoengineering system. Similarly there have been cases where the PCs come into contact with things that don't even approach their league, like when this same group was doing mercenary work for a small merchant and decided to hop into a known ambush. Said ambush was a couple of space pirates in small fighters expecting to deal with a merchant vessel, they got a warship and it went roughly as it sounds like it would. The paranoia doesn't tend to crop up in the context of just running a world, only with GMs being killer GMs as some sort of philosophical thing.

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?

That's one way to look at it. On the other hand, there are tons of situations where normal people go out of their way to meet people much better known (and often more accomplished) than they are. Say you're a musician, maybe you're in some sort of local band, and someone who is an absolute legend at playing your instrument comes to town. That's a High Level NPC Encounter IRL right there, and yet every musician I know looks forward to that sort of thing.

[The Extinguisher]

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.

Knight: "I don't carry my tourney lance with me."
Player: "Excuses already?"
Knight: "No excuses, I'm just saying, my lance is a combat weapon. Not the blunted one I use for tourneys."
Player: "Haha, what a coincidence, so is mine!"
Knight: "If risk of fatality is to be accepted, I must have an incentive to fight. Winner takes loser's gear?"
Player: "Hell yeah!"

They get on their horses, charge each other, knight wins initiative and deals 85 damage. The PC only had 30-something hit points. The knight promptly proceeds to undress the dead PC, take all his gear and money as the rest of the party is too scared to intervene, and rides away, dropping a small purse with 10 gp.

"Funeral expenses."

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.