If it’s a PbtA please expand on your system of choice!
I’ll start:
I really enjoyed Sexy Battle Wizards, but I think The Witch is Dead speaks to me more. I like player characters just being little weak dudes and struggling against normal stuff. (both of these are free by grant howitt and 1 page of rules)
I also enjoyed rude detectives, it has a surprisingly juicy dice system for a game that’s just 4-5 pages. It’s themed around child detective stories.
PbtA I like magpies stuff, like avatar and root, but my favorite until now was Fellowship 2e I think. Just so extremely versatile, and it’s a joy to give a lot of narrative control to players.
Last one is kinda cheating: my current favorite game is rules light within it’s genre. 13th Age is the easiest ‘dnd’ I’ve ever seen, and the amount of dumb rules and bookkeeping it prunes has reinvigorated 20f games for me! But compared to other games, it’s still a bunch of rules of course.
I’ve only played 10-15 or so systems with a a few forays into extremely niche systems, but I’ve really enjoyed Fate Condensed, far more than I thought I would. My regular group are the ideal audience for it too as we all have a very ‘writers room’ approach to storytelling.
“Only” 10-15… That is a good healthy number. When really thinking I got to 18 (I think), but that includes campaigns lasting but a session or two.
Unfortunately it’s paired with 100+ 5e sessions and no others have lasted more than 5, which is probably where my cynicism about it comes from. Plenty of mine were also one-shots.
That sounds way too similar. DnD being the staple game that I’m for some reason always in one. Finding groups for more niche games is hard, even filling groups for the games I run can be hard. So much that have to fit - schedules, tastes etc.
Finding players for the stuff I run, yes. Finding anyone else that invites you to play a game that is not 5e is unreasonably hard.
Here in Germany you can get black eye groups too, and sometimes cthulu, but those are the main ones
I really like Fate but I’ve struggled to find a good group for it. I tried to run it for my DND group and it didn’t really go well. I think partly because they didn’t know the system well and approached it more like DND - very zoomed in on their character rather than the more “writer’s room” style that fate can do well.
I had a lucky group to play it, where we often try to shoehorn writers room style play into 5e to it’s detriment.
Is fate intended for a certain kind of setting (fantasy, sci-fi etc) or is it more freeform/fits all?
Fate is probably about as freeform / fits all as you can get, and compared to other similar systems like GURPS, making the kind of alterations to make it fit Fantasy Vs apocalyptic Vs cyberpunk etc is really easy, but the system remains evocative as you chop and change it.
I’d absolutely recommend it as a one-shot system, although it’s also good for campaigns too. Players are encouraged to leave some parts of their character sheet blank and fill it out in the session as they discover who they are, which I think really helps players have satisfying characters for one-shots as they don’t get stuck not knowing their characters.