Full disclaimer that I probably won't be able to join whatever comes out of this since I'm just going to be far too busy these next few months, so feel free to ignore everything I'm saying. Still, being the patron of the arts that I am, I guess I'll give my thoughts on this contentious topic.

[quote=@webboysurf]
A perhaps unpopular thing that's worth noting, and it's a mentality that could help in this RP: The duels in Yu-Gi-Oh rarely follow the actual rules. If we treat dueling like the anime does, it's about character interaction and writing the drama and stakes of a duel, not so much making sure we are following tournament rules.
[/quote]

Maybe they don't follow the tournament rules in the sense that you can't say, run out of time or have to play matches, but they still very much follow the rules of the actual game in the anime like Summoning rules or following card text. The most you can say about any anime not named Duelist Kingdom is that they occasionally flub a ruling here or there.

[quote=@Calle]
Maybe we could let fate decide the outcome of the battle, the GM could roll a 1d2 dice and share the results.
But with several people already claiming they like playing the underdog, and my characters are rarely the powerful ones too, I think we could try to let the players duel and see how it goes.

[/quote]

Yeah, if you're going to leave it to chance anyway, then you might as well play it out. I'm always a proponent for playing out the duels since that's where a lot of the excitement of these RPs come from. Especially when you get into a back-and-forth duel and neither player knows what's going to happen next. Of course, deck balancing is really important for that, which brings me to my next point...

So I really like the point buy system for RPs where you have any chance of non-scripted dueling, and you can just give players special plot cards through the story, and then make them buy the boring staples or engine cards that everybody needs through the points. 

A couple reasons I like this. The first is that it is honestly a good balancing tool. Certainly some people might abuse it, but by-and-large most players will be roughly at the same power level, and that level will be kept pretty low. And then whoever is falling behind can be given cards through the story or whatnot. The second is that it gives people a chance to use niche cards they've never heard of before. Case-in-point, in Ammokkx's RP, I had never heard of [url=https://yugipedia.com/wiki/Chaos_Burst]Chaos Burst[/url] before, but I liked it, so I threw it in. Finally, it just keeps people engaged because there's such an endorphin boost from actually getting cards and opening packs. Weird point to make in an RP, I know, but there really is another element of progression that keeps players engaged. 

But if you're going to do full script, yeah ignore all of that.