I run things rather loosely. Mainly because most of the time I game in the afternoon on weekends because I work overnights so when most people are playing I'm actually sleeping so they tend to have a little more energy than I do so if they wanna chat it just gives me a little more time to think about what I might want to try to accomplish that game.
I also do which isn't much, but it's enough for me.
I role play with a group of pretty close friends, so we don't really set aside a time to meet up and play anything, we just bust out the books when the mood takes us. We eliminated the use of battle maps in Saga Edition (despite my rather huge miniatures collection), so that we can take a more casual approach to it.
I almost never use minis, only in fantasy games at crutial moments with lots of complicated tactics etc. I find it slows gameplay too much, too wargamey for me.
I tried minis for Icar but a typical combat scene tends to be across multiple levels and buildings with drive-by shootings and virtual world (Gaia) hacking, people diving from moving cars to buildings and buildings into moving cars, innocents running everywhere, terrain following missiles, snipers and fisticuffs. Miniatures just doesn't quite cut it.
I'll use dice for "miniuatures" but I don't actually have it represent anything other than "this is the general area in which you all are." I'm with misterecho on this one, it feels too wargamey for me.
I also do which isn't much, but it's enough for me.
I do love my miniatures, and I play some wargames, but I prefer to keep the two hobbies (Roleplaying & Wargaming) separate. I like roleplaying games to have a certain level of flow, and adding to many wargame-like elements tends to utterly disrupt that.
Unfortunately one of my friends is far too used to wargaming, and breaks that flow I mentioned to discuss strategy far-too-often.