I know a lot of people recommend rules-light games for beginners, but if your group has neither roleplaying experience or theater experience, then something more structured and board-gamey may actually benefit. What I find is that players without any experience fall into choice paralysis in rules light games, and having clearer structures can facilitate learning. It really does depend on what sort of experience your players are interested in. If I had to make a blind recommendation, I think that the Free League “Year Zero Engine” games might be a good candidate if you’ve never played a TRPG before. They have the right balance of rules complexity for new players, good GM support and high production values. There are plenty of different genres (and degrees of complexity) in the ecosystem.

Some examples that you may want to look at:

• Mutant: Year Zero (post-apocalyptic adventure)
• Dragonbane (fantasy adventure) (Technically not YZE, but it has similar levels of complexity)
• Vaesen (mystery, folklore, horror)
• ALIEN RPG (sci-fi, horror)
• Tales from the Loop (coming of age, sci-fi adventure).

Most of the these games have a starter kit with one-shot adventures that are meant to introduce players to the system and roleplaying more general.

Monster of the Week is pretty simple to play and run in my experience. My group sometimes uses it for one-shots when one of us is out of town because you can whip up characters and stories real quickly.

A little oddball and not really a typical ttrpg, but Fiasco is a lot of fun for practicing those RP chops. No GM, just collaborative storytelling with a structure to ensure that whatever it is your character is trying to set up goes disastrously, for themselves or someone else.

DnD 5e is also a great beginner system, if you have one really experienced player willing to DM and bear the weight of the (lack of) rules upon their mighty shoulders like Atlas. Very very easy as a player, but needs a good DM to make a lot of rulings on things the game rules don’t actually cover.

Do you have an idea of what setting you want to play in, and is anyone willing to be GM and guide the story or would you prefer a setting where you all get to be players (those exist!)?

What worked for me is first finding a setting that you all like. Mechanics are really secondary.

Paranoia!

The Zap! Playstyle encourages a slapstick game of lighthearted betrayals.

Make sure to give the players conflicting onjectives from their secret societies tho.

I recently ran my first game of The Witch is Dead for my kids’ first game and we had a blast. You play as woodland creatures trying to avenge the death of a friendly witch. It has simple, one page rules so you don’t get bogged down flipping through a book trying to find stuff. It also has a little chart you can use to give you some basic points for your adventure, but it’s fine if you make your own thing up.

Another one page game you might want to check out is Everyone is John. I haven’t played it yet, but from what I’ve seen it tends to get kind of dark since everyone is a competing personality trying to control John.

If you were thinking a DnD setting there’s Quest, I haven’t played it but it has a more simplified rule set than even DnD 5e.

https://www.adventure.game/news/quest-digital-edition-free-to-play-announcement

You can also look into online assistants like Roll20 for loading maps and letting people make character sheets, but it does have its own learning curve just figuring out the program.

I recommend Dungeon World for the following reasons:

• Zero prep. Whoever’s going to be the GM doesn’t need to spend hours on planning. There’s also shared world building, instead of the players just creating their characters and the GM being responsible for everything else.

• It has few rules, but they’re important. New players playing dungeon world tend to quickly pick up on how the game is delivering structured creativity, and once they collectively have that understanding you’re in a good place to experiment with other systems or homebrew variations on Dungeon World.

• It has low material demands. Pencil, paper, 6-sided dice. A browser window with tabs for everyone’s character sheets in Google Docs will work, but you don’t even need that.

• There’s a bunch of other themes under the ‘Powered By The Apocalypse’ system that you can easily switch to.