LexTenebris@starhawk @MikeFerdinando At a certain point, it's incumbent on you to say, "Let's turn up the intensity; let's play one of these mechanically lighter games."
You will probably have to be the GM, but that puts you in a situation where you can literally create the most intense situations that they have to figure their way through. Particularly for Blades in the Dark and its immediate derivatives.
The fact that you can simply make hard moves as a GM and force them to start whittling away at their limited amount of Stress in order to buy it off gives you a really big stick for achieving intensity.
Once they figure out that managing stress and distributing the inevitable fallout of partial successes around the table literally is the crunchy bit of the mechanics, they'll start getting into it. But you have to lean hard on it.
Hell, there's plenty of opportunity to pull out Alien: the RPG or Mothership. If you want some more crunchy, high-intensity action, these things exist. Use them.
https://www.tuesdayknightgames.com/collections/mothership-core-rules/products/mothership-core-set
(Those Dark Places is likely the cheaper entry point, but still.)
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