Quote Originally Posted by The Glyphstone View Post
So he Scries on you from his Demense and remotely summons antimatter in your pants from two continents away instead.
Getting blasé with the majiks is a straight ticket to archmagi kicking down your door, hunters marauding you and eventually being eaten by an elder demon. That sounds like game balance to me!

Better plan - be the Mage's friend, so he won't have a reason to PvP you. Then you don't need the cultist guards, and he'll be able to cast around you without issue.
Legit.

"Hey, you want to learn death? Follow me for a night. One condition though – we get an oath before your consilium to owe me a favor. I'll take that magically reinforced if necessary~"

Quote Originally Posted by The Glyphstone View Post
You would have hated OWoD Mage then...it's explicitly like that, whether you have the appropriate magic knowledge to do something far less relevant than your ability to BS your storyteller into letting what magic you do have be used for a functionally identical result. For example, the use of the Life Arcana, focused on healing, buffing, and protection, to instant-kill someone via magical super-cancer.

In NuMage, they just gave up and let Mages have unlimited power. Space mastery+Matter mastery+a demense and ritual casting can totally conjure antimatter in someone's pants at a distance, and the only bit that requires any ST BSing is the antimatter bit (as opposed to, say, thermite).
Not... Really? A starting character needs to be utterly incapable of most professions and livelihood to have mastery, the XP investment is steep, and you're technically required to RP and do in-game story stuff (read: storyteller gating) to get up to mastery, to get a demesne and to get the soulstone for the demesne. There are mechanisms for inhibiting abuse, it's just that people who worship at the altar of RAW tend to miss the tone of the nWoD writers.

I mean, seriously. A LOT rides on their tone, and when that isn't communicated clearly... Look at all the GMC issues that they thought a casual, "just play it out without lawyering" attitude would fix.