I always laugh when I see people claim there is a “DM shortage.” No there isnt. You just don’t want to try the games the DM/GM wants to run.
“Not D&D 5E? Why is it so hard to find a game to play in?!?!?”. Try Shadowdark or Vampire or Cyberpunk etc. it won’t kill you and you might like it.
There is a bit of the Starbucks problem here. People are willing to pay $6 for Starbucks because they know Starbucks. If you crash your black van into a wall in front of someone, leap out wearing your ski-mask, and demand they pay you $6 for your coffee, they're likely to mace you and run away. It took Starbucks
years to build that brand awareness. Same with McDonald's and Coca-Cola.
D&D is a known brand and 5e D&D is a known system. It takes some effort to show players that it's worth their time to learn a new system for some benefit and I don't know that many GMs are really good at that. GMs might love a system but what's in it for the player? As you say, Cyberpunk is a clear difference and if your players are into cyberpunk as a genre, that might be a good sell. Selling an interesting world can work. Selling OSR games might be a little harder ("It's like 5e but with less character options and you'll die more").
I propose that GMs focus on making themselves the brand. Play with your group of friends who trust
you and it might be easier to convince them to try something else. "Try" is also important here. "Hey friends, I thought we might try 13th Age for a couple of sessions and see what we think once we're done with our current campaign".
I think it's easier to get a group to try something for a handful of sessions than fully switch away from a system they like to one they don't know about.
It also helps when you can give them the rules for free. I think its important for other RPGs to have some sort of free player guide so players can dig into it without having to invest money in something they don't know anything about and may have little interest in to begin with.
So yeah, I think we GMs can sharpen our skills at convincing groups to try other systems. In the end, our groups may still prefer D&D 5e, which is fine, but we'd at least like to try some other stuff.
I had a lot of success with this approach. In the past few years I've run Shadowdark, Numenera, Blades in the Dark, Tales of the Valiant, A5e, and a few one-shots of other systems like Shadow of the Weird Wizard. My players are all pretty open to trying whatever system I want to try.
I'm hoping to run Shadow of the Weird Wizard, 13th Age, and another Shadowdark campaign this year or next but I'm also totally cool running D&D 2024 or Tales of the Valiant as well.
