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[EBannion]

You could arrange for your noble to have an *accident*.

Something involving an atom smasher and a locked door would be sufficient.

I think the OP's problem is that they -don't- want the noble to die. If they wanted the noble to die, they'd let her kill herself off with her insanity

[Korva]

Yeah I don't follow the apparently commonplace view of "nobles are a bloody nuisance with a short life expectancy".

I don't normally mind dwarves dying in silly or bloody ways, but I am am rather found of my founders. And if ennobling someone is basically guaranteed to end in insanity when anyone else has a nice room, it does bug me. I just wish there was a way to prevent it. A noble goes berserk because I don't care about or forget her demands? Great! A noble goes suddenly goes into an unstoppable decline ending in insanity despite me doing the best to please her and despite her having been fine for a decade? Irritating.

Maybe sticking the baron/count/duke in their own barrow to reduce contact with others and simulate noble snobbishness would work? Something must have set my duchess off over the past few seasons.

[Hyndis]

Nobles do get upset if other non-nobles have very nice rooms.

You can get around this by giving non-nobles simple rooms. They can still be nice, just don't cover them with masterwork engravings. For the non-noble its like a personal palace, but from the perspective of the noble they're living in a horrible bedroom. This is the ideal setup, so the noble is happy because he has the best room, but the non-nobles are happy because they have very nice rooms compared to what they're used to.

I give my dorfs each a 3x3 bedroom with one bed, no furniture, and fully smoothed. Keeps them happy and the nobles happy.

[Korva]

I use 5x5 bedrooms, as I said, with a bed (two for a married couple), cabinet (maybe two for a family), a gem window and sometimes a chest, though those are not currently used. Smoothed, not engraved. Special dwarves get suites. For some reason my duchess was fine with this for years so I suppose her socializing after the other founders got upgraded suites eventually tipped her off and triggered the fatal thought?

*grumble* I think I WILL try the Urist McUseless approach next time, and if s/he flips out too, s/he can go kiss a deadly dust FB.

[Necro910]

*grumble* I think I WILL try the Urist McUseless approach next time, and if s/he flips out too, s/he can go kiss a deadly dust FB.

Don't give any more mentally retarded and useless dwarfy ideas to the dwarves.

[Mimidormi]

A way to give to your dwarves nice rooms without pissing off nobles is to resize their room to 1x1, containing only the bed, ideally placed above a common stone floor. This way, the 'real' room can be as big and decorated as you want, they'll get the 'slept in a good bedroom' thought, and the nobles won't get jealous, since officially the room consists only of a bed.

If it's a matter of principle and you want your deserving dwarves to have royal rooms, nobles-be-damned, then yes, nominate as baron some dwarf you think you won't get attached to.

I know how one can get attached to the founders. For your duchess, as a last resort you could try in your older save to hastily make a mist generator (even if operated manually, you'll need it only for one instant) or expose her to the mist of a natural waterfall or something, while you reset the rooms and reassign them. Remember to check the 'R' menu, to see the quality of the room you currently have, if you haven't already.

In general, about barons: i never nominate any of the founders. I choose someone with a liking for minimum 3 craftable kind of objects that i'm not planning to export (because of the chance they're gonna prohibit exports instead of order production when they can order 3 mandates).
If they're asking for some metal i discover i don't have on the map, i try to scrounge at least 1 bar, so when they ask for production i can forge and re-melt a statue of that metal, given the 31.xx bug
(metal items requiring only one bar to be forged, and statues melted give back one bar).

[Naz]

Here's how I handle it. The liaison tells me the king wants to make us a barony and that I need to nominate someone. I tell him to get bent.

[Korva]

Thanks for the suggestions, but the duchess is doomed. She does not get any more happy thoughts at all, and even hacking her happiness with Runesmith only lasts for a few seconds tops, then it's rock bottom again. I probably have some backup from some time before she got that fatal bad thought, but that'd mean at least 2-3 seasons of work -- and I'd still have to wreck my other founders' rooms. So I'll likely just let her die, finish an ongoing project or two, and then shelve that fort. I knew nobles got jealous but whew, I didn't know they can go insane and die because of it.

@Naz: that is option #3 after deleting the jealousy token next time, or appointing some random dwarf I don't really care about, but sadly it prevents making trade requests. Upsides and downsides to everything. But I still love this damn game. :p

[Girlinhat]

Assign her her own personal war dog!  She may enjoy the pet enough to be content.  And if not, well... war dog.

[Nasikabatrachus]

Have you tried evicting every other dwarf from their current rooms? I'm curious to see if that would work.

[CerealGuns]

Here's how I handle it. The liaison tells me the king wants to make us a barony and that I need to nominate someone. I tell him to get bent.

But annoying nobles who can't be satisfied are part of the "fun".   

[thegoatgod_pan]

I think the best way to deal with the issue is to give her a room so nice, it blows all the others out of the water-- this means
A. HUGE--size count, bigger is fundamentally better
B. Expensive--not just gem windows, or engravings or golden statues, but artifact chairs, tables, cabinets, chains, traps with artifact mechanisms and goblin bone weapons.

Check with R--if there is anyone even close, keep making it bigger, if you want her happy, put her in a burrow under a water reservoir, dig a ramp to the water runs downwards making fog.  Instant temporary happiness boost.*

*may cause accidental drowning, which I guess isn't bad

Also doesn't making you legendary weaponsmith baron ensure that she will never work again? I always make my marksdwarves barons, since they'll keep training/getting awesome even as lazy nobles (plus its always fun to design your baron's personal archery range/game preserve)

[thegoatgod_pan]

Oh and let's not forget the old--favorite pet in a cage made of the favorite metal trick--that generally pushes them right up to content.

[JmzLost]

The real question here is why isn't she getting any happy thoughts anymore?  Having an inferior with a better room should be offset by "mandate met", "slept in a room like a personal palace", "had a pretty decent drink", etc.
 

Thanks for the suggestions, but the duchess is doomed. She does not get any more happy thoughts at all, and even hacking her happiness with Runesmith only lasts for a few seconds tops, then it's rock bottom again.

Even if she's gone insane already, there should still be happy thoughts from earlier in the year.  I've only had a couple of forts with nobles, and they usually end early because I'm dissatisfied with something.  I've never heard of nobles going totally nuts because of 1 bad thought in a mature fort.  Tantrum spirals or large-scale disaster, yes.  One dwarf has a better room, no.

JMZ

EDIT:  As a possible (future) solution, define a barracks from the cabinet as well as a bedroom from the bed.  Overlapping rooms cut the actual value by 75%, so the dwarf in question will have 2 ok rooms rather than 1 great room.  And since the tag is [SLEEP_PRETENSION], maybe a crappy bedroom with an awesome barracks/dining room/tomb won't drive your duchess insane.  Maybe.  I'm not sure exactly how that part works.

[Korva]

Dining rooms and offices trigger the thought, too. I recall she complained about someone's office a couple years ago but that didn't make her want to go insane. This time it was someone's dining room.

I had the idea about double-definition rooms too as it does reduce value by a ton. That didn't pacify her, though. Kicking the other founders out of their suites didn't help either. As for the thoughts: she works at her forge (1), she eats, she drinks, she has pets. No happy thoughts related to that have shown up on her screen after the "utterly traumatized" half a season or so ago. Send her to the surface, though, and she immediately gets a bad thought from the sun -- go figure. All this was while she's already Miserable. I'll try the kick-the-others-out approach with an older save in which she's still Unhappy (or Very Unhappy?) sometime later today and see if that makes any difference.

(1) Nobles do have those work exemption tags, but my barons have always been happy to do whatever I tell them to. The one time I had a monarch, even she and her consort got their hands dirty. I approve of that. Monarchs are the best since they don't make demands, it's just a shame that they prevent further caravans -- I expect that will be changed in the future.