[ZeConster]

Admittedly I don't know the ins and outs of 5E chargen that well, but how's that Adepts EDG? And what are the 2ndry or tertiay skill sets of such a Magician gonna be like (like a shaman face)? I have to assume they're worse than a "normal" magician's could be, either less well-rounded than they could be or less Lucky than they could be -, and fact is the point of a low-magic setting is not to completely nerf your Awakened PCs, because that sucks for the player (unless I guess that PC nerfing is part of the GM/OPs vision here).

Of course the characters will 'lack' in some aspect, but they'll be stronger in others: DACBE versus DCABE will have -3 Edge, 10 fewer skill points, 5 fewer spells, and +8 Attribute points; DBCAE versus DBACE will have -3 Edge, 5 fewer spells, and 8/8 extra skill points. That's how the Priority System works: if you take a lower Priority in one category, you can then use a higher Priority in another, resulting in a different but not necessarily inferior character. Therefore, any restriction to the Magic priority level in order to fit a "low-Magic" campaign setting will also require a restriction on the starting Magic rating, otherwise players can still be Magical powerhouses.

[Solarious]

I don't think the point of the low magic campaign like we are discussing would be to force an awakened character to be (or even start at) any lower level then in a normal game. If they want to use karma or special points to up their power then I'm cool with that. It's built into the system already- but they are gonna pay.

Not to mention the fact that they are going to get a LOT more attention from pretty much everybody
May have to be a level 3 SURGE mutant too
Going back to the X-Men analogy, this would probably be Prof X or Magneto

Maybe even have a "Pheonix" character that is at a Magic 8 or 9 but has incredible difficulty controlling that raw power?

[emsquared]

Of course the characters will 'lack' in some aspect...

Yes, and by controlling the magic priority you are guaranteeing it will be at least after some fashion in their Magic, and so if a player wants to compensate for that (they want to play a "fully capable" Magician) they will then have to pass that deficit to another area (Metatype and/or EDG), which will cause compromise in another area - that's all the nerf you need; limiting of choices, not forcing a choice (4 MAG). No hard cap means they have the choice to accept that 4 cap and have the rest of the character as they want, or to have the powerful magician and let the other stuff suffer. Choice is good. Your notion that there is no one with a 6 MAG in a low-magic setting is completely subjective to your view of what low-magic means to a campaign (and is generally inconsistent with what it means in other systems).

Low magic classically means there are fewer Magicians out there (which makes a PC magician more powerful, yes, but the one's that are out there are tightly controlled by authorities - in SR, maybe they're rounded up as kids as much as possible and made into little more than Corp weapons via drugs and explosive collars to control them or something), they're feared/hated (you could make the thresholds for noticing casting lower, and have manatech available used to detect them by mundanes), their foci and fetishes and gear are not publicly available (double the Availability with automatic F classification?) and where they are available they are more expensive (cost multiplier), it could especially mean that there are lot's more low-mana (-1 or 2 or 3? to MAG Attribute) areas in the world - like cities where there's not a lot of living things? There's better ways to do low magic than forcing something on a player like an attribute cap.

[ZeConster]

Yes, and by controlling the magic priority you are guaranteeing it will be at least after some fashion in their Magic, and so if a player wants to compensate for that (they want to play a "fully capable" Magician) they will then have to pass that deficit to another area (Metatype and/or EDG), which will cause compromise in another area - that's all the nerf you need; limiting of choices, not forcing a choice (4 MAG).

Again, you act like a Magician who doesn't have Magic A or Magic B is automatically an inferior Magician, when this is simply not the case. Restricting the Magic priority does nothing to prevent players from making powerful-but-well-rounded Magicians. The examples I give clearly show this: one has 8 extra Attribute points, and the other has 8 more skill points and 8 more skill group point. Sacrificing something in order to gain something else isn't a nerf, it's using the priority system.

There's better ways to do low magic than forcing something on a player like an attribute cap.

My point is that if you restrict the Magic priority (which isn't my suggestion in the first place), it may come across as a measure intended to nerf Awakened characters to some degree, but you don't actually nerf them, you just prevent certain priority setups, which may not even be the best ones. So if the goal is to make it harder to be a superwizard, that restriction alone doesn't do the trick.