* Have him assassinated. Repeatedly. I bet that will gt their attention. If you're lucky, they may lose the office due to long absence.
* Get all his vassals to swap to other duchies. This is especially powerful if he's not a region lord. He could end up as duke of an empty duchy.
* If he's a city lord, stop selling him food. If he's a rural lord, stop buying his food.
* Exile him. Especially powerful now that you get all your taxes in bonds.
* Get religion involved, and have him auto da fe'd. Works great for region lords. If you get him out of the region, then get all his lords to leave him.
* Have diplomats and ambassadors badmouth him in his own region, and maybe drive the region rogue. Get priests involved in it, too.
* Switch regional appointments to voting instead of appointing, and work around him.
* If he has a steward, work with the steward to buy/sell food.
These are all counter-moves to somebody who is actively working against you. They each have pretty serious repurcussions for someone who isn't guilty of anything but who just isn't playing the game at all. You're essentially asking some combination of the ruler or the other lords or the realm itself to undergo pretty significant strife as a workaround.
* Have him assassinated. Repeatedly. I bet that will gt their attention. If you're lucky, they may lose the office due to long absence.
And appear to be the bad guy for sending a murderer after a Duke who, just as you said, hasn't done something blatantly wrong and people don't like acting against folks who haven't done anything blatantly wrong. The 'offense' in this case warrants removal from some high office - not a knife in the back.
Get all his vassals to swap to other duchies. This is especially powerful if he's not a region lord. He could end up as duke of an empty duchy.
A huge amount of political jockeying that is dependent upon the geography supporting the solution. "Everybody switch to Duchy B! Now a month later when we have a new Duke, switch back to Duchy A!" If that's not gamey, I don't know what is.
* If he's a city lord, stop selling him food. If he's a rural lord, stop buying his food.
And give up a huge piece of your realm's wealth as well as the time and energy of its players to restore the region afterwards. "Stop buying his food" won't even hurt him: it'll hurt everybody who isn't him.
* Have diplomats and ambassadors badmouth him in his own region, and maybe drive the region rogue. Get priests involved in it, too.
The only option I ever had as a diplomat/ambassador was to badmouth a realm, not a person. This would impact all future Dukes as well and you're tied up undoing all of the work you laboriously did to remove the guy who doesn't play the game.
* Switch regional appointments to voting instead of appointing, and work around him.
Sure - destabilize the whole realm and change
your entire government to accommodate Duke won't read his mail?
These are all perfectly valid plays against a Duke who is actively messing with the realm, and in that instance, the prices you pay are just the price of playing politics. The logic here doesn't work because you're asking for an IC solution to an OOC problem. When it's just a regular noble you can pass it off as 'oh the mail was late' or 'I was out drinking with my men' or any suggestion on the inactivity page. When it's a council member or a Duke you are just meta-gaming to achieve a solution that, "properly" in-character, would be achievable far more easily. It ought to be tough to un-Duke a Duke whose only offense is working against the administration in some quiet way - but pretending that one is who isn't just so you can stir up thousands of peasants against them doesn't and won't ever "feel" IC to everybody involved, even if the game provides buttons you can push to achieve the outcome you want.
This whole thread exists because the mechanisms that are there don't deal with this situation. Maybe the balance we have is as good as it gets -- royal Dukes who are inactive are pretty rare, after all, and as you pointed out if they're not royal then you just give them the boot (as we did with the Toupellonian Duke).
