Just Doing My Best

neil shortly after his embrace (back when he was a housewife) witnessing the horrors and him in the 90s !!

pros: yay! i finally look like a guy! people think im a man!

he has no personality, I cannot think of any 3 ‘interests’ less interesting, which would be fine if he wasn’t also fucking evil

Robert Ingpen (Australian, b.1936)

Books are short, readable, well written. Systems are light weight enough to easily get into and complex enough to not get old quickly.

If the first game you play in the hobby is very complicated, has a lot of rules you have to memorize because they aren't translated anywhere on the character sheets, and thus takes a serious amount of time to both learn and play, of course the idea of playing a different TTRPG is going to be intimidating. Why waste your time learning another system that might confuse you when 5e can be adapted to any story, any genre, anything you want ever*? Like, sheesh, is it any wonder so many people struggle getting into the hobby at large and why there's a "GM shortage" when that's seen as the standard?

Anyway. Play indie games (because, let's face it, unless you're Wizards of the Coast, Evil Hat, Plus-One EXP, or a few scant others, most of the hobby is indie-published; surveys have shown that even Evil Hat and Plus-One don't make the kind of money WotC does). Look at Zine Quest in February on Kickstarter, where hobbyists publish their own games. Look at the zine section of your friendly local game story. Scrounge around on itch.io to see what looks weird and cool. Try games like:

Ten Candles (tragic horror in which you light 10 real life candles and all of your characters die when the last one burns out)

Apollo 47 (silly game about fixing things on the very mundane Apollo 47 moon mission - make up your own technobabble! Easily played while waiting in line or for the bus)

Thousand Year Vampire (solo journaling game where your vampire lives so they long they forget what was important to them)

Glatisant (duo game where one player is the knight errant and the other the questing beast on top of a map made of cards)

Fortune Seekers (globe-trotting treasure hunters take on big bad guys to save ancient relics - the intro book comes with an adventure AND all of its puzzles on fancy papers!)

And that's just a handful of games, some that have won indie game awards and some that barely anyone has heard of, but all of which I have played recently and had a lot of fun with. Many zines are like 20-40 pages, chock full of handmade art and stuff like "how to roleplay a character" that take up space. Often all of the actual game-specific rules fit only on a fraction of the page count and are easy to learn.

Play indie TTRPGs! :]

Edit: After a little digging I believe that this species of starfish has a mutation that sometimes occurs, here's a different photo and "biscuit starfish" individual:

A Nervous Old Man (right) and his Emotional Support Violence Machine (Left)