[Pathfinder] Instigate Psychic Duel

Psychic Duels are a fun concept, and fill similar narrative roles to wizard duels and shapeshifter duels. It is therefore natural to see Paizo attempt to dip into this evocative trope, but they managed to be simultaneously too cautious and drastic in their design.

To be involved in a psychic duel, you need to either cast or fail a Will save against a 2nd level spell. You and your opponent are functionally dazed while you spend character resources (be it spells, ki, fatigue, etc) in an attempt to ultimately drain the others' HP, which transfers into the waking world. The minigame is complete and different from the other core mechanics, and I'm not impressed with it. The most potent aspect of this spell is that your friends can wail on their unresponsive body while you try to hunker down against their willpower, which makes this spell objectively worse than hideous laughter, which is the same level and requires the same saving throw.

The barrier to entry is simply too high and too niche to justify the complexity. If you retain the complexity, regardless of my opinion on its quality, then you need to make it easier to participate and therefore make the entire basis of psychic duels become a keystone in your supplement. If you keep the "You Must Be This Tall To Ride" sign in place, then the effect of the spell needs to be dramatically simplified; single opposed roll with duration/effects based on the margin of failure/success level of complexity at most.

Personally, I think there are only two options for stuff like Psychic Duels in this context.

Psychic Tug of War
Describe it as evocatively as you like. The tactical result is the same, you and your opponent have an effect you're wanting to inflict upon the other and spend some non-trivial amount of time struggling. Commonly, the effect doesn't matter and it's simply a means for a weaker character to distract the stronger while their allies run off with the Dark Lord's underwear or something. At its core, this should just be a die rolling exercise where the iterative nature gives a disproportional advantage to small differences in strength; make a roll and make a tick mark of some kind until one side runs out and gets hit. It's fast to explain, takes up little time in a fight scene that involves more than two people, and gives the player something to do rather than waiting until the fight's over. It's boring for scenes where everyone sits back and watches the fight because it's too simple, but the players not involved in a duel are going to be bored anyway and this way you can go through each round faster than regular combat.

Mind Bullets
Ignore the whole mindscape angle and simply make psychic combat an extension of regular combat. Derive some modifier from your mental stats to make a Psi-CMB or something and create new combat maneuvers with a psychic aesthetic, similar to the Dirty Trick from Pathfinder. Want to mimic that stare-down between two psychics? Make it a ranged grapple of some kind. Make access to the psychic maneuvers a trait and automatically accessible for psychic spellcasters. Create an entire category of feats and spells that expand, enhance, and broaden the capabilities of psychic combat.