Dead in one blow

[RFisher]

And that's largely why I hate random encounters. If you don't want a PC to die from a random encounter, I would argue that encounter is meaningless in the grand scale of the campaign. If it's meaningless, why have the encounter at all?

It wasn't meaningless. It had a purpose. Even in the grand scale of the campaign.

I'd just misjudged something. I wasn't as familiar with the rules as I should've been. So, the encounter was at risk of becoming something other than I'd intended.

(Though, there is a perfectly good argument that the player made a critical...even fatal...mistake & that that was what made it a fatal encounter. But I felt I needed to correct my mistake.)