I’m struggling with overly confident players. Obviously, killing a PC is one way to make them think twice about the next time they pick a fight, but I don’t want to resort to that if I don’t have to. Is there a long term status condition or something I can subject them to that’s good at making players averse to picking fights, even when they think they can win?
Why do you say they’re overconfident? Are they consistently winning fights without an opportunity cost? If so, then I would say their confidence is well placed. The fact that you jumped straight from overconfidence to character death suggests to me that you may be missing a more progressive range of costs and therefore haven’t been giving them any reasons to consider alternative solutions.
Finally, consider just telling them that a fight would be dangerous and could result in death. We forget that the characters are seasoned adventurers and the players may not be. If the players lack an accurate intuition for the difficulty of a fight, let them know that their characters can judge the danger more accurately and fill them in. I did this without even a hint of an in-world justification with a first over-leveled dragon fight in a previous D&D campaign, warning the players directly that it wasn’t a fair fight and they would likely pay a serious price for rolling the dice an hoping their numbers were bigger. Because they were new players and this situation was unprecedented in their experience, I went so far as to run a round of combat in a vision-sequence to drive home how much devastation they were in for in a straight fight and then woke them up from the vision with no real world consequence for the combat other than maybe some exhaustion.This really changed their mindset and they began gathering intel and negotiating and planning how to tip the odds back in their favor through skullduggery.
In any case, I’d encourage to ask thoughtfully whether their confidence is genuinely misplaced or if you’d telegraphed to them that success is inevitable. If so, talk to them directly about a change in danger level, and start telegraphing it in multiple ways so they can see when other paths are available or advisable.