[blackatana]

I am playing in a game where a PC mage has control actions.  She is rolling 19 dice on her spellcasting and rolls 14 dice on drains.  We came up on a very strong opponent. All I know about this guy is he had great dodge and firearm skills and really good armor and soak. So prolly a supped up sammie or an adept of some sort. This guy was in the middle of mowing down 4 guards while easily avoiding fire from two auto turrets. 

Our mage rolls in control actions him.  19 dice vs this guys willpower which even if it was 6 was not gonna be a problem. Then our mage says shoot yourself in the face twice.  Our GM decides that he gets no dodge, and only armor from a helmet would help him soak which he didn't have. he actually survives the hits and our mage just keeps telling him to shoot himself in the face till he kills himself. Apparently this guy had 20 boxes of physical. This is our first run in this campaign. I feel that this is just too OP.  If I was using chummer and created a non mage character. Lets say I used 900 BP. more than twice the normal and didn't care about character creation rules. As long as the guy I created wasn't a mage, our mage would have no problem just controlling him and having him commit suicide. In fact even if they had max augmented willpower of 9 then they would roll 9 dice vs 19 and would still commit suicide. Am I the only one that thinks this is just too damn OP? maybe we are doing the rules wrong, but in fact it seems that besides a hacker all characters should be mages with this kind of power and no drawbacks. yes, yes, drain, roll 14 dice to soak 3 boxes, oooooo, scary.

I am not the GM of this game, but I could tell that this guy was suppose to give us a serious issue, instead he was taken out by one action of one person. Throw in spirit concealability and our mage should have no problem eradicating almost any number of people with no threat to herself unless there is another mage.  I know I am harping on this. But it makes the game feel broken that the only way to stop mages is with other mages.  It takes away the fun and makes me want to stop playing.  I am really trying to enjoy this. But if one avenue is obviously superior to all others I just don't see the point.

[blackatana]

oh and he also doesn't recieve the -4 penalty for a called shot either, because he is doing the action to himself and its easy enough to shoot yourself with a pistol in the head.

[Kincaid]

If your GM is setting the threshold for shooting yourself in the head at one, the problem isn't the spell.

Also note that mental manipulation spells are one of those weird instances in which wires help you think faster, in the sense that the target gets to buy off hits on his (otherwise untaken) IPs.  This would certainly be cause for the use of Edge.

[blackatana]

This guy did have multiple IP. Not sure how he got them. And yes the GM decided one hit was enough to shoot yourself in the head and only roll body to soak. No dodge, and no -4 for called shot.

[Kincaid]

This guy did have multiple IP. Not sure how he got them. And yes the GM decided one hit was enough to shoot yourself in the head and only roll body to soak. No dodge, and no -4 for called shot.

I'm actually with the GM for not rolling dodge or taking a penalty on the shot (although for these sorts of scenes, I generally skip dice tbh), as for everything else s/he did...not so much.

[cr4kp0t]

This really comes down to your GM and how he sees mental manipulation.

Here is my take on it:

The initial test is very hard to overcome by anyone except a mage (or someone being supported by a mage).
So yeah it can be kind of OP.

However with control actions you are hamstrung as you don't maintain total control you just get to issue commands and when you don't, they can act normally. So your left with a bad scenario, casting a spell is a complex action and issuing a command is a simple action so the enemy is usually going to get at least one attempt to kill you!  The last is that as a sustained spell you are probably going to be suffering penalties. (There is also a separate argument around sustained spells as to whether you need to maintain LOS to sustain the spell but this varies greatly and there is little RAW on the matter, but i'm not going to start that debate again here)

Which brings me neatly to you scenario:

The GM (IMHO) made several mistakes...
1. He didn't obey the golden rule of shadow run: GEEK THE MAGE! So after the mage cast control actions and won. -the enemy should have hit him with everything in his arsenal.
2. The spell clearly states that all actions inflected upon the subject by the character suffer a penalty equal to the willpower of the subject so that shot to that suicide is not as simple as it sounds... (However as with Kincaid I as a GM usually hand wave these sort of scenarios.)
3. If this guy was meant to be a challenge to you as a group the GM should have built him with some sort of resistance to magic. There are many available qualities, adept powers and of course the big one: the counter spelling skill either on the character or from a support mage.

Overall while mental manipulation spell are very powerful they are not without limitations. For example unless your killing everyone you use it on they will know that you've used them in this way and they are going to want to kill you after or at the very least call for back up!