Now Gamemastering 7

First game != Yawn

There's a reason for that: the first minutes of a movie are a 'hook'. They're there to interest the viewer, get their attention. The first part of a movie isn't the part with most action, usually, that's why, in action movies, they put an action scene barely related to the main story just before the start. In James Bond movies, James Bond goes to a terrorist meeting site, steal a jet fighter, blows up everything and escapes safely. In "The General's Daughter", the main character faces off an arm dealer in an action-packed scene. In "The Matrix", Trinity beats the crap out of policemen and runs away from a 'man in black'. This is a very efficien, and widely used, technique.

How can you adapt this to rpgs, and more specifically Shadowrun? By starting in the thick of things. When your game start, you want to catch your player's attention so they come out thinking "what a great game" and not "next week should be very interesting at least". Therefor, you should start with a simple, yet interesting, run. Avoid all the boring and not so useful parts of the game, start right ahead in the important stuff. Don't start with "Joe, your fixer calls you" and then arrange a meeting with a Johnson -- start with "The small Sony compund is garded by 5 guards and 6 dogs. The run won't be as easy as it sounded when you negociated for the 10,000 nuyens with the Johnson, yesternight". The result is the same but the level of interest of the players is much higher.

Since it's a small run that serve's as introduction, you don't have to do all the intermediate steps, like dealing with the Johnson -- you know the players will accept the job (they always do, especially for a first run) and even if they barter they always end up having the money you, as a gm, decided they'd get (let's be realistic). Sure the encounter with the Johnson is important and can lead to some interesting bits of roleplay and give some important information about the run, but since this is a small introductory run these additionnal informations are less revelant (and you can always tell the players that the Johnson told them the info when they need it) and the relatively passive roleplay part isn't interesting enough to hook all player's attention on the game.

Of course, there are many variants to this. You can start with the Johson's meeting where something goes badly before any discussion can even start. You can start at the local bar where a band of japanese bikers throw 2 kg of C-16 through the window, obviously to kill the PCs. You can start with the PCs at a Trash-metal concert where the lead singer gets shot while singing. You can... well, you can start in lots of different ways. The important is to hook your players attention right away, so you can introduce the really important stuff more slowly and without loosing their interest.

Think about everybody

To hold interest of your players, something important is to get the interests of all players. Let me give you an example of what not to do. This tuesday night I had a first game in a new campaign of Star Wars. My character, Eipgar Shinks, was built in 15 minutes on the corner of a table (30 minutes before the game my gm told me that my Jedi wouldn't do). Thinking of my Shadowrun roots, I built hima mercenary, good in stealth and all kinds of fighting (you don't have much time to develop deep characters in 15 minutes with everybody waiting for you). In this first game, just about all the action was negociating and getting our cargo ship damaged while flying in it. Problem is, my character totally sucks at negociations and doesn't know squat about driving a spacecraft -- I must have thrown dice 3 times in the whole game, and did nothing of use throughout it. Boring.

Sure, the rest of the campaign might be very interesting -- it's just that this particular game wasn't, so I wasn't hooked in this game (especially since I had as much emotionnal link with my new character as I have for the mushrooms growing on my lawn). As a good gm, you don't want your players to get bored, therefor you want to avoid what I just described.

To do this you must know the PCs very well (so no characters done 15 minutes before the game) and know their edges, flaws and role. Then, you must think of your game in terms of allm these roles, edges and flaws. Try to use as many of them as often as possible -- make the difference between all characters be very clear and make them all useful. Don't forget about that gang who wants Joe's head on a stick, but don't forget either that he's the decker and therefor would like some computer networks to hack through.

Of course, some scenes you thought would involve player X might not involve him after all because player Y changed something in the setting of the scene (say Y is the diplomat and got the gangers to stop running after X). This can be problematic is said scene was supposed to be the important scene for X. If you don't want to railroad the players into that scene no matter what (and you shouldn't railroad them, ever), then you have to improvise. You can alter other scenes to make other skills from X show up, or you could simply get X into a situation that only him can solve (say he's away from the group). Basically, you want to get him to do something -- a passive PC makes a passive player, and a passive player is a bored player. A bored player is bad, so do something about it!