My players in the L5R RPG 5e Beta felt dueling lacked tension so I came up with an alternative system were duelists select their stances and actions from decks of cards, play their chosen stance and action cards face down, and then reveal them simultaneously. The cards I created are in the attached PDF document in case you are interested. The first two pages just contain numbers and letters so you can make sure you are printing the fronts and backs of the cards correctly. This is intended to be printed double-sided with pages flipped on the long edge. If printed correctly, 1a should line up with 2a and so on. Starting on page 3 are cards for two duelists, one Crane player with some Iaijutsu techniques and one adversary (Keinosuke from "A Ronin's Path"). Sorry, I couldn't load the editable Word document due to space limitations on this forum, but this was just a quick prototype anyway and you would probably want to make your own.

Here's how card based dueling is intended to work.

1. Duelists make assessment checks as usual and assume an initial ring stance. This initial stance will be less important than it was in the beta rules, but characters should still have one in case their are any pre-duel events or actions where their stance might matter.
2. Each duelist is given separate decks of stance cards and action cards. In the PDF attachment, the stance cards are the ones with the rive elemental symbols on the back and the action cards are the ones with clan symbols on the back. Each duelist will have only five stance cards, but they may have different number of action cards. Ideally, each player would have their own duel action card deck with all of their special techniques included.
3. Each duelist looks through their available cards, selects one stance card and one action card and plays them face down.
4. Duelists simultaneously reveal their chosen stance cards and assume their chosen stance.
5. Then, duelists simultaneously reveal their chosen action card and resolve them.
   1. Counter <Ring> cards are resolved first. If a duelist is countered and suffers an outburst from the strife they gained, the resulting critical strike is handled before moving on.
   2. It's my opinion that actions other than Counter, should be resolved simultaneously or at the discretion of the GM. This allows for simultaneous strikes. Alternately, you could resolve actions by initiative order, strife, honor, or GM fiat.
6. If the duel continues, each duelist reassembles their decks of stance and action cards and we start again from step 1. Generally, actions can be played over and over again, but you could have once-a-day or once-an-encounter actions that are removed from the deck after playing. Or you could have something like a thrown knife which literally and figuratively leaves the player's hand after being used.
7. If you like the Staredown part of the beta dueling rules where players bid initiative, you could put that in here somewhere.

That's the general idea. The simultaneous card flipping should add some tension to the duel and the whole process will hopefully move more quickly than the duels in the beta. Having action cards to choose from should help new players. Mine didn't know about all of the options available to them during their first duels. I liked dispensing with the Staredown were duelists secretly bid strife to gain initiative because my players didn't like it, but you could keep that if you want. Also, I included two Center action cards for you to choose from. Center (a) follows the beta rules while Center (b) is a more powerful alternative that I used.

I included a cards to represent the techniques the Kakita swordsman character had access to. Other characters will need different cards, of course. I would recommend including a few blank action cards as well so players can write in other actions they would like to attempt.

Card-based dueling was my response to how my players felt about duels in the beta rules. Duels in the final rule book may change, but if they don't change much from the beta then I will likely try to include something like this in my future games. In the meantime, thoughts and suggestions are appreciated.

L5R RPG 5e Duel Cards.pdf