No it isn't.
Could you elaborate on this?
Because I was
very careful to avoid saying something like "three times that deadly", or "three times that force". But in terms of stress, it really does have three times the stopping power (in the sense of being able to "incapacitate the target where it stands"), which implies to me that it's going to convey a decent amount of force.
Sleep spells are almost violations of the Fourth Law, not the First.
Yeah, I realise I didn't specifically state that, but I'm talking in terms of all of the Laws, not just the first.
And an electricity-as-tazer spell or spirit-based blood choke should be able to take someone out without killing 'em pretty well.
I'm not sure about the blood choke, but tasers have quite a death toll. They're not non-lethal, they're just less-lethal.
But at heart, no, I don't think making people worry about this is unfair, but I'd suggest you're doing it the wrong way, because you're violating the rules to achieve that effect.
Which rule? Because the rules are quite clear that it needs to be within the limits of reason. And as the guy who's most familiar with setting and the rules, what I say is essentially going to serve as my group's limits of reason. That's why I'm concerned about being unfair - I don't want my reading of the setting to be unnecessarily punitive, when it's essentially going to be taken as canon.
Instead, I suggest Compels on their High Concept. If they accept, using magic on those poor mortals is too dangerous and they either don't do it or risk Lawbreaker, if they refuse the Compel, they find a non-lethal spell. Do this every time it comes up and everyone has to be pretty careful, but the rules remain unchanged and there's no unfairness. You can do the same thing on a cop shooting people or other such situations, too.
I do like this take on it, and it was probably a large part of how I was going to go about it in the first place.