Do mages have it too easy?, They get new spells awfully quickly... Options

[Kurukami]

In one of the shadowrunning games I've been in, mages were effectively the be-all and end-all of ass-kickers. Fast because of certain house rules effectively granting them magically wired reflexes, heavily armored unless you threw absolutely disgusting amounts of firepower at them, and with enough mana to roast legions of samurai and assassins with barely the blink of an eye. Hell, one guy had the equivalent of a Citymaster-style combat vehicle where he put a ritual circle in the back. Apparently, he once researched a new spell there on a drive back from a run in the Salish-Sidhe. Research time? Oh, four or five hours.

I, on the other hand, focus mainly on decker characters. The rules in Matrix are pretty straightforward -- it takes you a damned long time to code out new programs, just as it should be. Otherwise, advancement comes far too quickly -- though the MPCP limits the extent to which that might be possible.

I just find myself wishing that the scales didn't seem so definitively tipped in the direction of mages being uber. Has anyone implemented house rules of some kind that made things a bit more, well, equal?

(By the way? The aforementioned mage was at some disgusting level of initiation. 11 or 12 or something like that. Of course, this was mainly because the GM allowed the spending of cash to gain Karma...)