How historically accurate are the prizes/penalties from the tournaments in GoT and Ko7K? They always seemed like they had a horrible Risk/Reward ratio to me to attract so many competitors. It would be like the NFL having several thousand teams, but only paid the one team that won the Superbowl, and any teams that lost in the first round of the playoffs would have to hand over their personal houses to the team that beat them.

Well, I’ve talked about the prizes recently.

But when it comes to the penalty, yes that’s accurate. Most tourney knights made their money off of ransoms and not prizes, since there were many more of the former than the latter in each tourney.

However, you have to keep in mind the class and class mentality of the participants involved. Tourneys were a pastime of the nobility, not that much different from hunts or feasts or dances, so it was expected that the combatants in a tourney were A. rich enough to be able to ransom themselves/their arms/horses and B. not supposed to be concerned about money.

To use your sports analogy, imagine if you had to be in the top 5% of incomes and wealth to play in the NFL at all.