I don't see what's silly at all about charging a cash maintenance for
animals. Ever own an elephant? I'll bet Hannibal spent plenty to
take his elephants over the alps. Large, dangerous animals aren't
generally cheap to keep. I expect dragons require plenty of food,
all of meat, no doubt. They probably go through handlers fairly quickly
as well. I doubt a noble leading a stack of 200 dragons is dealing
with each one individually.
Maybe that's the key. A beastmaster can only have a limited number of
beasts in his stack. Any more than that, and there's a chance of them
either escaping, or attacking the rest of the stack. That might help
out some.
I think beastmastery is *way* too powerful. For the same amount of
effort as learning to be persuasive, you get the ability to have
complete and total control of huge, maintenance-free armies made up
of units that are far and away stronger than any possible humans.
Beastmastery, as it stands, seems to be more powerful than most
branches of magic, yet you can have every noble in your faction
learn it, easily.
I'll bet if beasts started costing in proportion to their strength,
you'd see these huge beast-stacks start to melt down to a more
reasonable size.
Keith Hearn