Forged in the dark are games that use blades in the dark which is a powered by the apocalypse game, so you'll pick them up quickly. Blades is an amazing game so I'd absolutely recommend this.
OSR games are definitely for a specific taste, they try to capture the early TTRPG era dungeon crawl tone over the very narrative forward modern TTRPG, which personally is the opposite direction from where my tastes have trended from 5e.
As long as we are capturing the world and not the grind. Could you imagine partying up and your DM narrates chopping yews for 4 hours? Lmao "you failed your one tick check"
Many years ago, our party found itself on a boat going down a river. With nothing better to do, we started fishing, hoping for the plot to continue after a couple of inconsequential dice rolls.
It didn't. We literally spent hours irl rolling dice to fish because our DM was very clearly not interested in running an actual game that day.
We soon started playing without him, bit I think that is the closest I ever got to OSR the ttrpg.
As the forever DM of my group, I am always willing to be a PC in a players game no matter the system (so far)… because I just want to play haha. I do only really run D&D myself though haha. We have talked about swapping to PE though because of Hasbro..
If you do make that change I'd really recommend playing a couple of oneshots between the switch with totally different systems. I'm finally exploring different TTRPGs now and it's made me realise I was doing the equivalent of only watching one franchise film series with all of cinema available.
I've had a killer time with FATE, City of Mist and Blades in the Dark.
I've absolutely loved narrative heavy oneshot games like Alice is Missing, For the Queen and Ten Candles.
I've enjoyed collaborative worldbuilding games like The Quiet year and Microscope (or anything else made by Ben Robbins), although I do think these are best to build a setting to play in because they leave some specific itch unscratched.
You know what your players like, I know mine are split between wanting to feel like they're devising a story that would make a good show and the other half are looking to be emotionally ransacked, so story heavy games that put the worldbuilding and decisions in the hands of the players is perfect for me.
7:7 All praise Yetsabu-Nech, the underworld’s nightmare, the black disk which stands before the sun! All praise Verhu, beaming with delight! All praise the fire which burns all! And the darkness shall swallow the darkness.
Oh, I'm even harder to pull. I know I've had a couple friends try to jump me into other settings this way, but if I can't convert my legacy Pathfinder characters into the setting you're trying to get into without having to sand parts off and sacrifice parts of the vision, it's a lot harder to get me to consider it more than that one time-- which is ironically, a lot of the reason I don't gel with 5e. Not enough splats for me to run my aged concepts as envisioned without having to make ill-fitting changes, or figure out how to convert a non-core Pathfinder class to 5e.
Straight up. THE single best/easiest/most fun way to both give the forever DMs a break and inspire others to take the plunge and run their own storylines. 🤗🔥