[@BrokenPromise]

[quote=BrokenPromise]
People in free-form battles get away with waaaay too much crap, no need to regurgitate that again in this topic. I was once fighting a mutant sausage that I'm pretty sure was borderline god modding. I can call him cheap because I won, but only because I was able to bait him into doing something reckless by going after his girlfriend. It was amusing, but rules would have made the experience that much better. I don't know how you balance a monk that fights with "sonic paint" and a sausage that can use attacks from every foe he's ever slain. And that sausage had done a LOT of dueling!
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This is precisely what I meant when I spoke about power-scaling, as well as the mention of the setting and the rules. What many role-players (and when I say many, I'm actually saying the vast majority) fail to understand is that the term "god-moding" is entirely subjective; something that's "broken" in one setting is completely balanced in another setting. Take various licensed fictions for example; if you were to take a character from the Demonbane franchise and toss them into the Harry Potter universe, they would immediately be considered "god-moding", but in its own verse that character flows just fine. Allowing characters with such grossly incompatible concepts to face off against each other is simply bad GMing (or bad collaborating if no GM exists). When the GM knows what they're doing, the players only go as overboard as the groundwork allows, so no "god-moding" ever occurs. I've collaborated many role-playing duels this way with my friends and associates. Badly defined terms like "god-moding" are thrown around almost as often as ones like "cliché" are these days.

I'm proficient at making sure the groundwork is solid in the first place (and a lot of time has been put into power-scaling my setting's characters/concepts), which is where the vast majority of flaws in free-form duels can be dealt with. I can only imagine [@ELGainsborough] experienced similarly bad groundwork in the past, since we all encounter it at some point. If free-form duelling isn't for you, it isn't for you, but you shouldn't assume it doesn't work for anyone just like I'm not assuming using Tabletop mechanics won't appeal to some people.

This is all, however, off the topic of the thread, but I felt the need to give the other side to the story. We can just agree to disagree, per se.

With the real topic in mind:

[quote=BrokenPromise]
When I say "won at character creation", I'm not referring to the dice rolls. A sorcerer will naturally be at a disadvantage to a paladin because of the paladin's higher magic armor and the sorcerer's lower physical armor. Stat allocation and skill choice also play a bigger roll in more closely evened out duels. Basically, the winner is the one who prepared the right way, rather than made the best moves.

To help make things interesting, maybe giving both parties some gold to spend on weapons, armor, and utility items would be best.
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When I was referring to builds, I didn't just mean the dice rolls (although in D&D characters can often be thoroughly crippled simply by getting unlucky rolls on their base stats), but was also referring to builds like aptitudes and skills as well, including equipment and items. Like I said, even with all of these factors taken into account I've never actually seen a system like this done successfully in terms of balance. I'm sure it exists, but my interest in the medium is similar to yours in free-form in the sense that I don't care enough about it to go looking all around the place to find it done right. Even if you grant people a lot of resources to better their characters, match-up problems are likely to occur, and in any MMORPG that has PvP the battle is usually already decided by how the players were prepared (and luck); that's how combat in RPGs work in the first place. Another big problem is status ailments; in PvE they are often quite interesting, but in PvP they are often flat gamebreakers; the "god-moding" of the setting if you will.

This is without even considering the previous point I made about how dice roles end up playing a bigger part in the outcome of the game rather than any sort of strategy. When accuracy and evasion are left up to luck, everything is essentially a gamble. As a long-standing chess player, leaving that much up to chance instead of tactics is something I dislike; hence one of my reasons for deciding to pull out of this style of duelling. As we've both already pointed out, most of the tactics are essentially determined by how you equipped yourself, so when you role-play in this situation you're really only role-playing reactions to how the dice roll as opposed to role-playing strategy. It's enjoyable for some people, such as D&D fans, but it isn't for me; I've done it and I got over it, which is why I said I'd probably not get involved in the first place.