There are a few spells where the force they are taken at don't matter, but 3rd edition did a rather thorough job of cleaning out those.
The important thing to understand about magic, is probably drain.
For spells in the 3rd edition, that's based on Force/2. And Shadowrun always rounds down, so if you cast a spell at Force 3, drain is based off of (F/2 = 3/2 = 1.5, round down) 1.
Take you Catalog spell as an Example.
Magic in the Shadows, p. 141 (That's MitS.141 in my normal notation).
It has a Drain code of +1(M), meaning that if you cast it at Force 2, it will have a drain of (2/2 = 1)+1 (M), or 2M.
This will be stun damage, unless your Magic attribute is really messed up (below Force, here 2).
For spells, Drain is always resisted using Willpower (and possibly dice from your spell pool, currently 4).
The next thing you need to understand, is that many spells are resisted. In this case, your target rolls to resist against the Force of the spell that you're casting. Thus resisted spells tend to be most useful when cast at a higher force.
That said, high Force isn't everything!
I personally like to try to cast spells at a force such that my Drain is nice and low. Preferably the Drain TN never exceeds 2.
Then I can use my spell pool dice to cast, and collect a ton of successes!
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You write Full Mage, so I'm assuming that you're playing a Hermetic and not a Shaman?
If so, you'll need to buy Sorcery and Conjuring libraries.
Once you have those, you won't need a lot of money to become a better mage, unless you decide to pony up the big cash for foci.
You will always be short on Karma though.
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Topic: Looking for some Character Advice and some rules guidance. (Read 3238 times)