The tabletop role-playing game genre has really taken off, but it’s still something most people have never tried. If you’re a fan, you probably spend a lot of time introducing new people to the genre, and most people say Dungeons and Dragons is the obvious starting point. Not only is it the most well known, for a lot of people, it’s the only one they know. I would bet that that most TTRPG players today started off playing D&D, but I would argue that it’s a bad first option.
There are so many other options. If you started playing TTRPGs 20 or more years ago, there weren’t as many tabletop games, and a lot of them were much harder to get into. D&D was a twist on classic wargames that involved having a bunch of miniatures and crunching a lot of numbers. These games are still around and still lots of fun if you can commit to learning how to play them, but D&D simplified a lot of the rules to make it more approachable. At the time, it was possibly the most approachable TTRPG in existence, but since then, many more games have been published—many that are far more approachable than D&D.
Session zero is boring and hard. Before you can have the first session of actually playing the game, you have to invent the characters you will play. This is known as session zero, where you go through the rules and choose the various skills, abilities, and talents your character will have as well as their backstory and personality. It is an hour of pure decision paralysis. As a new player, it’s really hard to choose when you don’t know why you’re choosing anything. It’s like ordering at the Cheesecake Factory, but you don’t know what any of the ingredients mean. Many campaigns have never made it to session one.1
The skills are transferrable. You might say, “I want to play D&D eventually. Learning another system plus D&D is harder than just learning D&D.“ I think learning a simpler system can actually make it easier to learn D&D. If you’re learning a new dance, you might learn the footwork in isolation and then the upper body motion in isolation before putting it together. Learning a more rules-lite system can allow the players to just focus on storytelling without being bogged down with mechanics. Once they’ve gotten the hang of it, the mechanics of D&D don’t seem as daunting. I’m not suggesting you start with an esoteric system like Ten Candles or Dialect. There’s a lot of simple systems (probably most systems) that share a lot of their playstyle with D&D.
So, if not D&D, what should you play? I think it should be a one-page RPG. All the rules fit on one page, and it’s a great way to introduce what TTRPG games feel like without having to do the setup. Perhaps the most well known one-page RPG is Lasers and Feelings by John Harper. It is a Star Trek-like setting where each character has a single stat between 2 and 5. Rolling for lasers (technical skills) requires rolling a d6 and getting a number less than your stat. Rolling for feelings (emotional skills) requires rolling greater than your stat. The better your character is at one, the less good they are at the other. With just those simple rules, you can introduce all the important parts of playing TTRPGs. If your group has fun and still wants to meet next week, then you can do session zero, and they’ll be much better prepared to do so.
Other one-page RPGs that could be good:
There and Back Again - a game that takes place in the world of The Hobbit. It’s a pretty straightforward RPG, but has a few more rules than L&F. I particularly like how neatly it’s laid out and can be folded into a little pamphlet.
The Witch is Dead - The theme is a little esoteric, but the mechanics are not. I’ve linked a fan’s nicely formatted version. Grant Howitt’s original handwritten one can be found here.
Wizard Squad - Of the ones I’ve listed, it’s the closest to D&D mechanics-wise2. It’s a little light on theme, but it shouldn’t be an issue if you’re a GM that likes to worldbuild.
Crimewave - a light ruleset with a noir theme. I wish this one included more of a story hook, but I suppose you can just pick your favorite noir plot and run with it.
A different version of L&F - Lasers and Feelings has plenty of re-themed versions3. If you don’t want to play sci-fi, I’m sure you can find one that fits your genre interests better.
There are several popular one-page RPGs that I’ve left out of this list. Most of them are esoteric in some way. They’re intended for an audience that already plays TTRPGs and are built off of “wouldn’t it be cool/funny if….” If you look up the most popular one-page RPGs, some of them are just joke creations that are more fun to read than to play. Some are experimental that try to explore a novel theme or play mechanic. Some are great games, but unfortunately, the formatting and typesetting of the rules is bad. For a new player, I think it’s important that they are not bombarded by a wall of text, even if it’s just one page long. (Thanks for reading my blog by the way.) I tried to pick ones that are well formatted and not too weird. Let me know in the comments which ones I missed.
There are strategies to mitigate this, like the GM doing session zero remotely one-on-one with each player. That deserves its own blog post.
Because it’s specifically meant to be an Old School Renaissance game, a style meant to call back to the RPGs of the 1970s.
Different versions of a game are called “hacks” in the RPG community. This is not a derogatory term.