QUOTE (fazzamar @ Jul 19 2010, 09:59 AM)

At the risk of starting another Direct Combat spell drain house rules thread here's the house rule that we use since I don't like the idea of increasing drain because the mage rolls well on the casting,
Drain is increased by the highest number of successes (not net, just regular) that a target gets on the spell resistance test.
Say for example you're casting a force 6 Stunball at 3 guys, Guy 1 gets 2 successes, Guy 2 gets 1, and Guy 3 gets 3. Then the mage will be facing 7 drain F/2 + 1 + target's successes (6/2+1+3).
Just to clarify for everyone, that is a house rule.
Back to OP, yeah, if a mage is built well and is careful, they will rarely suffer any sort of drain damage from spellcasting.
(F/2)+X is how you determine drain (X can be negative) for most spells, and stunbolt has an X of -1, so a force 6 stunbolt only has a drain of 2, which is going to be easy to bring down to nothing if your mages have a drain pool of 12ish.