Before diving in, I think the RAW Dueling rules are pretty good. I wouldn't tweak much about them myself. However, my group is never going to understand them. It's just not gonna happen. Out of 5 players, we have one, maybe two players with a sharp enough understanding of game mechanics to understand why a katana is much better than a tetsubo for a Finishing Blow. When our Hida Defender threw down with the leader of a Lion patrol, he was lucky, and I was generous. Despite some broken ribs, the Lion was not Bleeding, and had I allowed the duel to continue, he would have struck a Finishing Blow the next round. However, my group's eyes were beginning to glaze over, so I called it there.
Obviously, the full Dueling rules aren't for us. At least not most of us, not yet. One-roll duels, on the other hand, are just a bit too swingy. I hate to have Life and Death come down to a single die roll. Also, near as I can tell, the One-Roll Duels don't account for the Iaijutsu techniques, which is just... boooo!
With that in mind, I've been trying to break down a Duel into three steps, hopefully keeping them simple enough. I think I've got a decent framework, but it will need some tweaking to get the numbers to work.
Challenge:
This is an Initiative roll, pretty much standard. TN 1 Meditation.
Focus:
This is basically an initial Staredown. You can't attack yet, but you can Center or Predict. Predict is now a rolled action (Not sure what the TN should be. 1? 2? Vigilance?), and 2 Opp can be spent to predict an extra stance. This also allows you to spend Opps on the roll, whether successful or not. Characters without an Iaijutsu technique should probably draw their sword, and unless they take a Water stance, won't be able to take another action (assuming it's an Iaijutsu duel).
Strike:
You may act as usual at this phase, and the target
cannot defend
against any attacks. So as long as you hit, you inflict a Critical Strike.
So them's the basics. In a duel to First Blood, things will probably be over after the first strike. After that, I think it should come down to a skirmish, probably keeping the rules for Final Blow and bidding Strife to increase initiative.
There are a lot of little details I haven’t worked out, but overall, what do you think? I realize that basically what I’m doing is removing options, but those options were causing confusion and slowing the game down.