From the posts and responses here, it's fairly obvious that we all have different ways of running our games. Not to turn this into a "That sucks!" thread, but I'm curious how the various GMs up in this bitch would describe their games to idiots like the rest of us would don't know how it really should be done.

I'll start with the way I do my thang...

I'm guilty of the crime of running a style that is best described as "Technothriller". I'm a big fan of the genre on the whole and I take this nucleus and fuse the rest of the genres that comprise the mixture commonly identified as "Shadowrun" to create the alloy that is my game. Cyberpunk is definitely in effect (especially in the vein of Hardwired) more than the Fantasy aspect but I do loves me some heinous spellslinging and para-critters so don't be surprised if I toss a mage or nasty critter into the laps of my players now and again.

I generally start the character's in a routine-seeming op you'd expect in SR (bodyguarding, extraction, data-grab, find X person, etc) and then toss a good switcheroo just when they think they got the job cracked. Yeah, you found person X but they're dead in a most heinous manner and there is some big-time clues that show that there was a lot more going on than you thought. Oh yeah, and it's evil, nasty and probably distinctly unimpressed that you found out about it before it could finish it's mechanizations. Have a nice day!

I'm very lucky in that my players (and I) make characters that see bad stuff, realize that it has to be "handled", and are willing to risk life and limb to take care of it. We tend towards operational ruthlessness so it's Ok for me to toss it at them now and again and we have been known to do things for less scrilla or other payment than others might have be going for. And we don't do wetwork. Things break and people die but we don't do ops where the entire point is to whack someone.

Anyone else?

I generally tend to mix up style and theme a bit session to session.

At any rate often there will be some underlying "theme" I'm experimenting with or some such. They players don't know about this. But generally I'm experimenting with trying out new things or playing around with psychology. For example at one point I decided to give adding a romance element to the game a try. Stuff like that.

One thing that's become pretty constant is a blend of "running" and "personal development time" usually at the beginning and end of a session where PCs are doing little things on their own or not related to a job.

Grand Theft Auto + William Gibson + J.R.R. Tolkien = My Game.

...I tend towards a blend of Film Noir setting with elements of both a classic mystery and political thriller.

Pink Mohawks in an extremely dark and dying world.

The tone of my games varies from dark and gritty to resembling an 80's action movie at points. Depends on the night really. However, they almost always follow a pretty simple formula:

1. The hook: provide the players with an adventure hook, be it hard cash, new toys, or simply a moral choice.

2. The line: tell the characters a little more about the scenario, give them more information as they do legwork and / or explore their new environments.

3. The sinker: let the players deal with the consequences of their actions. There is almost always something that the players miss during stage #2, so this is where any hidden information or unforeseeable problems come out to mess with the players.

4. Resolution: check the body count, find out which runners are still breathing, and give out karma and cred.

TV series with soap opera element. The campaign is not as much defined by runs, but by on-going plots and story arcs, and "weirdness" striking. The characters live their lives, dealing with day jobs like being an assistant to a crazy magic professor or working in the simsense industry in various roles, dealing with debts, juggling two girlfriends who both may get the PC killed if flipping out, university, family etc., and then have their "running career" to work on as part of the local Mob assets, and then tend to encounter magical or otherwise strange or threatening situations during all of this, like curses, houngans, spirits, computer viruses, glitching AIs, pirate attacks, street races, and so on.

Mucho of Humor . . military satire . . Sergeant Bilko and that other dudes Navy come to mind . . or Mayor Paine . .

When I finally get around to running a game, it'll be (if all goes according to plan) a world where most everybody sees things as mundane, boring even...mohawks, tattoos, and oddly-shaped body parts are common. However, in the shadowrunning world, you see more than the occasional mage, and they're usually quite a bit more powerful than wage mages - and you see some REAL freaks like those scary warriors who can jump 20m, come down, and take someone's head off with their sword. Not to mention the folks that can hack your commlink without even trying, or without needing a commlink themselves...

I'm guilty of loving weird. Plant changelings? Awesome. Menehune / Sea Drakes? Awesome. AI pcs walking around in Otomos getting into trouble? Awesome. Bug Spirits? Awesome in an Aliens sort of way. I'm not huge on Shedim though; for some reason they just never really caught on.

In my head I'd love to be playing something that mixes a weird, Hunter S. Thompson vibe with Ghost in the Shell with a bit of Fables tossed in there. What actually emerges usually comes out like a slapstick Michael Bay action movie.

In other words, I'm the Michael Bay of Weird Shadowrun Shit™.

my formula at the moment:

1 part A-Team
1 part CSI
1 part Gilligans Island
2 Parts Rogue Warrior (ala Demo Dick)

mix carefuly and then add

4 parts Chemical X( what ever the team tosses in)

sit back and smile at the pretty explosive reaction.

My SR4 campaign is fairly bland. I started up offering jobs from a couple trusted fixer contacts and as the runs progress, the group crosses paths with main characters they "wronged" in earlier runs. Plus, my players seem to make plenty of small time enemies along the way, so its almost a little bit of cat and mouse with the mafia, lone star and whatever other enemies they have made.

I like to draw from character backgrounds to drop into plots and basically give the group the feeling that they should always look over their shoulders cause someone is trying to get at them. All the while, they are getting jobs from trusted contacts. From the point of view of just the run, its pretty much a Mission Impossible type style. I lay down the objectives and they do all the legwork and planning to make it a successful run.

And I always keep a file on mistakes the group makes so I can revisit them on them in the future...

The games I run at the moment (quite irregular, sadly) are fairly dark and gritty. Low level characters in a low level environment. Everyone's determined not to die in the gutter, and they'd kill their children to make sure they don't. Those who carved out a niche hold on to it with an iron fist and attack everyone they can't control. There's only the perps and the victims, and you decide which side you're on.

I really hope I can establish a motive there, so the first visit to a corp town will be somewhat surreal.

Hard to give me formula.
Its gritty even Fields of fire will have grit.
I normaly play game ideas that are not too comman mercs in afirca I think about reworking the zone of STALKER fame in to SR for a gritty and quite odd game (i'm thinking to keep it at about the same time of the zone in STALKER so early awakening stuff no one really know what going on ect.) But I have run more normal games they can be any thing really in one black ops game I think 4 NPC where killed by the group. They all whent for stealth and none leathl ammo and traps. Though they have set the corp sec on each other a few times. In another game I had close to troll tanks are us a more gang based game with wars and more heavy duty runs.

So simply odd off the wall games that tend to explore the extremes of SR's setting.

My games are very... fluid. I start out with plans for the npcs, have one of them hire the pcs, and see where things go from there. Normally, the pcs end up bumping elbows with some of the weirdest crazies in the area. That fixer? yeah, you don't know it, but he's actually possessed by a free toxic spirit. The cute bartender? she's a drake who's hiding from GW because she pissed him off. Now, what that info means to the pcs depends entirely on what they do. Do they help the toxic spirit in hopes that he'll grant them more power? Or do they kill him, because it's the right thing to do? Do they help the drake, or do they hand her over to GW in the hopes that he'll grant them a favor?

Ultimately, it's a big mishmash of chaos, intrigue, and a much bigger world than the PCs will see... until this contact drops dead, or that one suddenly starts blowing up half the city. Pink mohawk? sure, if the pcs want it. Wetwork? I've got a list of people that are worth a pretty penny dead... but you would still have to take the job.

Legwork is the key. Ultimately, while I am god to the world, I will allow the pcs to set the mood. The world doesn't change much... contacts will still be locked in a constant power struggle... makes life more fun for everyone, no?

My Recipie:

2 cups A-Team
4 oz Comic Book Superheroes
1 cup Lethal Weapon
1/4 cup James Bond

Combine ingredients and simmer for 17 minutes. Bring to boil and immediately serve, heavily garnished with Monty Python. Not for people with nut allergies. Makes 4 servings.

Dramatic small scale personal view tv serial docu-drama set in a independantly evolving interative world that shifts themes with each story while remaining faithful to the internal metaphor.

Or I mercilessly manipulate the PC's through the worst drek(emotional, physical and mental) I think they may survive, with just enough good stuff so they keep going and keep the flame of hope burning bright.

I just ran "On the Run" for my next group, and they said they want more things to spawn off of their contacts and backstories (they all answered the 20 question quiz in Runners Companion for bonus karma, and are really really pumped that they have fleshed out characters). So, I am more or less intertwining stories and twisting different threads into some kind of composition to span more than a few missions and hopefully start a nice long campaign arc. I asked them about the tone and mood, and I got more than a few "keep it dark and creepy" responses coming from the shaman and bounty hunter, so I expect to be throwing some spooky toxic and magical threats at them to keep them on guard. I also was told to keep lots of criminal elements in organized crime, so I have to work in mob wars. They all agreed that they love interacting with what they read in the sourcebooks, so that shouldn't be too hard implementing the upcoming Ghost Cartels and taking them through Emergence (we're still pre Hong Kong Techno Outbreak).

I told them more in a joking but serious manner that I am going to scour the threats books and core sourcebooks for spooky very cyberpunk themed plot devices and let them make checks down a list in order of importance to gear what to throw in and where. After all, if I don't run a game they want to play, then the group disbands and I'm left hanging...

Dystopian Anarchy+MegaCorp Luxury+Gangs/crime on every level of Community=Questionable Windows of Opportunity

Sometimes Sin City,
Sometimes Pink Mohawks & Uzis,
Sometimes Ghost in the Shell, &
the occasional 2070-equivalent of Apocalypse Now.

I abhor cyberpunk and pretty much everything it stands for. It was a God-awful genre in the 80's and it's God-awful one now. It was nothing but paranoia run rampant and extrapolated in the dumbest ways possible.

Even when I first started with Shadowrun (my initial attraction was to the blend of the near-future sci-fi and fantasy genres, not the cyberpunk overtones) I ignored the artwork and the lame dystopian atmosphere in favor of a setting closer to what you see in The Fifth Element, Payback, G vs. E, Leon the Professional, Boondock Saints, or Starship Troopers. If you mash all those together you actually get a pretty decent take on my view of the setting. It's basically our modern world 50-80 years in the future after magic's return. I dislike a lot of the basic elements of the setting (the NAN, governments giving up their soverign rights willy-nilly the world over, the Matrix's protrayal, people randomly deciding to hate everyone and everything to a degree not seen since the holocaust, etc.), but I ran with it anyway and made it mine and my player's own along the way.

You don't need the themes in cyberpunk to have shithole squalors, poverty, oppression, or powerful corporations. You don't need it to have a thriving underworld. You sure as hell don't need it to introduce augmentations. And you most assuredly don't need it to have a criminal subculture revolving around corporate espionage and mercenary work. The majority of the world can be just like it is right this second and still have all of those characteristics about it.

So, basically, when I'm running the game the world is a pretty nice place overall. The characters just don't spend much time in that world.

I have always had a common thread, no matter how disimilar the runs themselves may be.

The current campaign takes a leaf out of Vampire the masquerade where its about the disassembly of the players morals and ethics stone by stone, until they become the monsters.

A bit of A-Team
A bit of old John Woo films
A teensy bit of Big Trouble in Little China
Some obvious GitS
Lots of System Shock
And just a bit of red mist