Getting Hosed By Magic Options

[DocTaotsu]

I've been running a SR game for a couple of sessions now and we've been having an excellent time. I keep adding pages to my "Why doesn't it never go smooth?" reference guide and my players keep staying alive and enjoying themselves. I was starting to feel really good about the game, feeling like I was doin my job of making the 6-8 hours they give up to play worth the time.

Than we took on a third player who wanted to be a mage.

The game was an exercise in frustration for a couple of reasons:
1. Player/GM not familiar enough with the magic rules
2. GM unable to fairly and consistently decide what a given spell could do.
3. Game just didn't flow and no amount of my patented "Gaming Gloss" could make it move forward at the speed we were used to. One player was brutally honest and said, "You know, I think I liked it better before we had to deal with magic."

The first two problems are clearly mine, and I figure that learning the rules and pounding out some house rules on spell effects will get us moving in the right direction. In particular we had a problem with Bind because the description really doesn't tell me how freaking powerful it is, in fact, aside from guarenteeing that it would effect a given target, I had no idea why a player would cast it at anyting higher than force 4. At the same time should a force 4 spell be able to lock up the wheel of a hardened combat vehicle? Shouldn't all those horsies make it hard to keep it bound? Should I do an extended opposed test of some sort (beyond the initial threshold test)? Gragh? What the hell do you all do with Ignite too? What's to keep a force 4 Ignite spell from lighting an entire tank or part there of on fire? It says in the description that it burns normally... last time I checked burning metal burns pretty damn hot and for freakin forever.

How do you all run magic so that it doesn't completely side track the game everytime the player wants to summon a spirit or cast a complex spell? How can I do this balancing without making it stupid easy for the the mage to "break" the universe? What's the best way to control the almost overwhelming power of a magic level 5 mage tooling around discretely lighting shit on fire or projecting all over the damn place?

I know I'm just being dense and unimaginative, so thanks in advance.