Um, I am playing catch up here and starting to understand where Braden was coming from by splitting (a) from (c) and his proposed codex amendment. Looking at the clause in the rules on wills and inheritance, there is a potential conflict between the first and second sentences:

(d) - Wills & Inheritance: Upon the death of a noble his land goes to the highest member of his feudal chain. If he is independent the land goes to the King. All land in the King's Demesne is passed to the new King. Duke's can pass on their rank to a House member of their choosing, by naming a successor in a valid will. Wills must be PMed to Zim before the Avatar’s death to be considered valid. If a Duke dies without naming a successor, the King picks the successor from among the highest ranked Nobles in their House.
Suppose an land owner not in a House but with vassals dies without a will. By the first sentence, his land goes to the highest ranking vassal. By the second, it goes to the King. I think this is just a failing in the rules - the clause was not written with a mind to feudal chains that are not inside a House (although the oaths to fealty rules do allow such chains). There's also no explicit mention in the rules of wills being used to transfer land - unless you are a Duke, what happens to your lands when you die is decided by either the first or second sentence, not by any will you write.

I don't think there is much point trying to discern what was intended or meant by the rules on this contradiction, as I'd don't think we had thought things through to this extent when drafting them. We are essentially charting new territory and de facto making new rules, even if we don't pass a formal amendment.

This poll could potentially decide OOC which sentence we follow. If you vote (a), as Braden argued, then the landowner is not classified as an independent in the sense of the second sentence and so his vassals inherit his lands. If you vote (c) [or (a) and (c)], as Ituralde argued, then the landowner is classified as an independent and so the King gets his lands. However, I am not sure everybody is up to speed on this. I certainly was not and voted (c) without understanding this nuance (I thought the poll was more to clarify the much more straightforward issue of whether the Duc of Lorraine could be described as an independent[1]). Plus, formally, we don't decide rules by simple polls but by codex ammendments (or by GM rulings).

My feeling on this is that it seems a good issue to decide in character, as it is very "political" and there's not a clear OOC intention or meaning discernible from the rules. It is basically about the strength of Houses and flexibility for setting up alternative long lasting feudal chains that are not Houses. So we either pass an IC codex amendment to sort this stuff out or, failing that, rely on the provisions in the rules for handling rules disputes IC (King/Seneschal decides). At the moment, everything is hypothetical so there is no rules dispute per se. So we either leave things grey, to be decided when an actual dispute arises, or we propose an IC conseil amendment to clarify matters at the next Conseil.

So to take the hypothetical case of Prince Charles dying intestate with Staufen outside of a Duchy, my opinion is that we don't know whether the King or Charles's vassal would inherit Staufen. It would be an IC rules dispute and, since the King had a vested interest, the Seneschal of the day would decide.


[1]The issue about whether the Duc of Lorraine's lands stay in the Duchy or go to the King seems quite distinct from all the above.