I'm pretty interested in this. Now I'm plumbing the depths of my character repertoire, trying to find something suitable.

Questions. What will be the extent of player interaction outside of these 1v1 battles? And should a player lose a battle, will that have them removed from the RP? What sort of power level will you be looking for with these characters, to avoid obvious imbalances?

A potential flaw with the current battle system has me thinking: unless a player can "win" a round, their input in the RP is very limited. Essentially you aren't even permitted to control your own character after a certain point, and your input has been removed and delegated to another player. A key principle of game design is that players hate to have control removed from them, and so this is striking me as a red flag.