I’m not running behind, you’re running behind…
A game that’s quick to learn?
I’d vote for Cairn again for this one, as everyone in the group seemed to take to it pretty swiftly during the first session. Second edition will be out soon and I’m not sure if that will complicate matters. The book’s certainly a lot longer now, but at lot of that is monster creation stuff and world building advice – so far as I can tell from the preview PDFs, the core rules are still short and to the point.
Also I should mention Hero Kids, which was the first game I ran for the family group several years ago.
Characters have a certain amount of dice in various skills. You want your character to do that thing, you roll that many dice, the opponent rolls their dice, highest roll wins. Doesn’t really get any more complicated than that. Simple rules, great friendly art style. Also there’s a Space expansion set for science fiction style adventures.
As for the Day Seventeen question about ‘an engaging RPG community’?
In the olden days that would have been Dragonslayers at QUB in Belfast, but now it’s mostly dice.camp on Mastodon where I tend to just lurk about absorbing the ambiance.