Scraping in under the wire (depending on time zone) for day two of this thing, and the question was: What is a great introductory RPG?
Most recently I’ve used AMAZING TALES and HERO KIDS; both are simple systems that are easy to pick up and play, and both are mainly aimed at getting kids involved in RPGS.
My own kids enjoyed them both, and whilst the older ones have since moved on to other more complicated systems with their own groups, the youngster still enjoys the occasional game of Hero Kids (when not distracted by Minecraft or some other electronic entertainment).
Obviously, for the older potential gamer, I’d be more inclined to run something like Call of Cthulhu: it’s a pretty solid basis for a beginners’ game–especially if you play dilettantes and academics, just ‘helping out a friend’–as long as you don’t rush headlong into the non-euclidean geometries and SAN loss. There’s even a starter set now with pre-gen characters. There’s a similar thing with Runequest, but it might be a touch overwhelming for a first game.
I should probably mention Broken Rooms, a game about variant worlds and multiple disasters. Players start as ordinary people facing terrible events, and then find out they’re not so ordinary people after all.
Maybe even Electric Bastionland, which starts strange from the off but has a fantastic style and sense of place: that place being a bizarre, new-weird, last-city-standing metropolis with a heavy dying earth kind of vibe over everything.
Any game could be a fine starting point. It all depends on the group, which is true for everything RPG related really: what does the group want, what are they expecting, how can you best provide that so everyone has fun.