It seems like resisting magic is really hard, even with very high Bod/Will and spell resistance. Are there any other ways to resist magic besides adding in counterspelling? For example, a very strong magician can almost always succeed at mind control since it's relatively easy to get 15 dice pool for the spellcasting roll while a resist pool will usually top out at 10 (without counter-spelling).

Astral hazing reduces the force of any spell cast at you by 4 (and is actually a disadvantage) and arcane arrester lowers force of any spell cast at you by half. Think the second one forbids mixing with spell resistance quality, but those two together can make you quite resistant to spells. Both are in RC.

Wow Astral Hazing is utterly over powered. What gives?

It even effects magic cast on the person regardless of whether the caster is in the vicinity of the background count.

Actually its IMPOSSIBLE. It is one of the three major things ticking me off in this edition. You can have a willpower of 6 and against a normal (npc) spellslinger you have about what 30%-40% chance to resist? Grml. Good thing about resisting mindcontrol is at least you can do it more often... every few minutes.

But seriously the Force against attribute and half threshold for controlling were much nicer.

As Karoline said: a few qualities and metahuman/surge effects help (some alot). I think that is the reason there are so many Fomories out there *g*

I was working on a bit Cyberware which would help against mindcontrol... strictly Houseruling of course:

It would work with a dedicated simsense feedback and an highly advanced agent system. You (or a friendly hacker/operator) could enter mission objectives, friendlists, confirmed enemies, magical data. And the system would monitor your feelings, emotional responses and (limited) actions and would remind you of what to do in an emotional way. So when you were helping the enemy you would feel like insane, like SOMETHING is terrible wrong. A higher (and REALLY expensive) version would pretty much be a second consciousness always prodding you to do the things it is programmed for.

Of course it had LOADS of drawbacks (it might get confused, might make you react weird when faced with unknowns) and could (if hacked of fed with wrong information decrease your effectiveness or outright brainwash you)

Overall i liked the idea though and will introduce some these systems in my game as SOTA-Experimental stuff.