Allright, I've got a few more ideas...

Tie voting influence heavily to land. Have all avatars start with an allegiance to a house when they spawn. All avatars must always be part of a house. Avatars can change houses at any point. New houses can be formed in one of two ways. The first way is that when a crusader captures the crusading target, he may choose to keep it for himself and start a house instead of the land going to his lord. The second way to start a new house would be if a player had two adjacent provinces he could "secede" from his current house and start a new one. If the player only has 1 city, he could ally with another player with an adjacent city and they could secede together (with a previous agreement about which one would become Duke).

I'm thinking of houses in terms of geography. An avatar would orignally hail from a certain house's territory. He would likely be aqcuainted with the higher ranking members of that area. This provides a role playing "springboard" similar to the family relations in KOTR while still allowing RBGs and House creation like in LOTR. I believe it would provide more PvP conflict because Dukes obviously won't want to lose influence because some scheming vassal ran off with a province.

I believe the ranks should be...

Baron- voting power is equal to 1+ # of provinces in his control
Duke- voting power equal to 1+ # of landed vassals
Prince- voting power equal to that of his other rank +1
King- voting power equal to authority

Any opinions?