How difficult is it to play a blind Magician in SR4

Pretty rough. For starters you won't be able to attack anyone on the physical realm with your spellcasting without Touch spells, and even then you'll have a -2 dice pool penalty. That's being pretty generous, too, since technically you can't cast on the physical while using astral perception at all (if memory serves).

Something we really should get around to clarifying these days.

Touch spells do work even if you can't see the target (p.173, SR4). Technically speaking a dual-natured magician can cast spells on the physical and the astral, but is of course restricted by what targets they can see with their natural vision. You couldn't really fault a GM for saying that if your natural vision is caput then your ability to cast ranged spells on the physical is also naturally caput, but the canny player could make the argument that its allowable by virtue of the fact that there is no specific rule disallowing it, in addition to the rules in place for casting while dual natured, in addition to the fact that you can actually "see" the target with astral perception - in which case the kindly GM would grant a Perception Test, either at -6 (standard blind fire modifier) to represent "firing blind" or more likely an Astral Perception Test imposing the normal Astral Visibility modifiers given in Street Magic.

I played a blind magician for awhile, I mainly used indirect AoE combat spells and utility spells though. I only took a -10 BP modification for being blind as he let me cast Physical spells on the physical plane while in astral sight.

Chris

Hmm...

Blind Magician.

If you use Astral Perception, you are Dual Natured. One neat aspect of that classification is that you can specify which Plane (Physical or Astral) the spell works on.

Thus your blind mage using Astral Perception can target that ganger across the street and cast a spell at him even though the ganger is not active on the Astral. You'd be subject to the normal visibility modifiers plus you may be affected by some visibility mods the Astral has different from the Physical (glass is opaque / blocks LOS on the Astral for example).

Of course being Dual Natured has its own drawbacks.

Harder then a blind sniper actually.