Have you ever had or been a GM tempted to artificially bump up these factors as a result of players becoming too powerful that it affected the gameplay? As a result, having the players focus even more on those skills to beat an ever increasing difficulty factor? Thoughts?

the eventual need for that sort of thing is one reason i don't choose to play SR4.

Ironic that this is an SR3 question then, isn't it?

*Note the bit about raising TNs.

I don't think either system is immune really

The temptation is there. But it shouldn't be indulged. It's really easy to make things hard without upping TNs or thresholds. Instead of raising the difficulty of a task arbitrarily, throw a curveball. Instead of making a matrix host rating 1 million, give it a teleporting SAN or bury it inside of a tiered network structure. Instead of making it arbitrarily harder for the rigger to accelerate, make the NPCs behave intelligently so he has to do more than just drive really fast to get away. Runs that are won and lost based only on how many dice you have are not well executed. A smart team with weak dice pools should be able to get through tough situations with tactics; a stupid team with beefy dice pools should get hosed.

heh, i actually didn't notice that.

here's the thing with SR3--i've played it at the ridiculously high end. one of the characters was a physmage (hey, he was first built in 2nd ed) who had, no shit, a magic rating of 42. he had 9s or higher in every stat; he had ten or more skills at 14+; he had foci on par with D&D artifacts; he had freaking magical power armor. i am not even kidding.

the GM challenged that character. she put that character through his paces, destroyed a lot of his toys, came close to killing him.

there were two reasons the GM was able to seriously challenge that character. the first was, she's smarter than God. i understand that not every GM can make that claim, so i find it perfectly reasonable that not every GM would be able to run a game that challenged a character like that. the second reason, though, is that a +8 TN is almost as big a hurdle to a character with 14 skill as it is to a character with 3 skill. that is to say, against +8 TN, a character with lots of dice to throw stands a significant chance of failure. not as big a chance of failure as the guy with 3 dice, certainly--but it's still a tough roll to make.

yes, any system can reach the point where the difficulty inherent in the mechanics isn't enough to challenge the characters. i can speak from personal experience, though, when i say that in a well-crafted variable-TN system like SR3, that point is way, way up there.

Since the OP stated thresholds/TN, I thought it referred to any edition and GMs who deal with making things harder to compensate for power creep.

In answer to the question, yes. I have had many GMs do this. Some take the next step away, as far as I am concerned, and make sure everything happens at the most inopportune time for the PCs - where they can apply the most TN modifiers. I have not really had a GM deal with it like writers have to deal with Superman's powers, like making him choose who to save, needing to be in two places at once, things that are going to let the PC likely succeed in the chosen action, but making choosing the action difficult, and regretting the consequences of the action not taken.

It's funny, but this is a topic that one of my players and myself have talked about for over 15 years now. It's also one which has been very hard as the GM for me to deal with.

As a GM my greatest joy comes from seeing where the players take a story. I try to remain unbiased and if they walk up to "Major Plot Line #1" and say "Ummm Nope.", then thats fine.

But one thing that has been hard for me to do is being comfortable with the PC's being very powerful compared to the world. The approach that I usually take is one of Virtual Level's. Here the PC"s start at the bottom and become the best of the bottom feeders. Then they go to the next level of mobs where they again are at the bottom and work their way up. Each time getting deeper into the thick of the powers who truely run the world.

This works well but gives them a sense that they need to min/max even more.

This player who I have been having this long running talk to basically points out that once your in the top 1% of all gunslingers, then the world shouldn't become populated with new gunslingers who are all about as good as you. Then I counter with the usual, but those new gunslingers were always there so its more that your not really as good as you think you are. Then it moves into racial max's and my brain explodes.

Fact is, if someone has a ton of dice then they are good at what they do and should be given the ability to show this.

Ideas:

A great way of doing this is the 1 vs many. Making them split their dice pools is a great way to have them roll less dice but also let them show off how bad ass they are.

Another thing I have done is have them deal with many things one right after another. For casters this can make drain start to stack up and for those who use ammo, I have had people run out before. Which then they started to use the weapons they found which often they had less dice using.

just my 2

'Any edition' would still include SR3. The post I responded to was assuming it was an SR4 (only) question.