Pingolf is usually done as score based. The most common way to set "par" is to pre-test each game with a set of "typical skill level for the event" players and chose a goal, whether score or feature, so that the average number of balls to reach it is 3 or 4. Possibly the most important thing to do is decide what the maximum score on a hole will be. Tournament pingolf usually goes with either 6 or 10; 6 is used when you don't achieve the goal by the end of ball 5 (ALL games are set to 5 balls!) but do not wish to distinguish further based on "how close you got". 10 is used when you do distinguish, with the scores from 6-10 based on what percentage of the goal you achieved (i.e. 6=almost got there, 10=farthest away). A max of 6 is MUCH better for casual players, otherwise you'll have too many people getting 10's that knock them out of contention.

Another consideration is how much time you have. The less time, the easier you want the goals to be, in order to get more people through all of the "course". If the goals are too hard, too many people will be playing all 5 balls which slows things down.

That brings up another point: the goals need to be well-balanced across_ games. If one machine's goal is too easy and another's is too hard, everyone will finish the easy machine quickly and then have to wait around for the people on the hard game to finish before players can switch games/holes; not so fun. All the more reason to pre-test your goals!

Team play can use either the better score or the total score of the players. Which is better depends on how balanced everyone's skill level is and how even the teams are.

Difference in point total would be a poor choice; teams could sandbag to get close-together low scores. A better non-pingolf way to do the "closest scores win" thing would be to scale it for both absolute score and percentage, not raw, distance apart. Something like within 10% over 25M is worth X, within 5% is worth 2X, but within 5% over 50M is worth 3X or 4X. What might be more fun than that, though, is a preset target score and you must get as close to it as you can WITHOUT TILTING.

FYI, there are many threads about Pingolf over on Tiltforums.