What system to introduce someone to RPGs?

You have a friend/know someone who's never played an RPG before. They've expressed interest in playing a game but have no idea where to start. What system do you recommend to them? What about that system is particularly hooking for a new player? If not a particular system, a genre/style of game?

The most important thing for new players is simply having a game to play. If they want to see how gaming works, probably Dungeons and Dragons and/or Pathfinder since both are popular and widely played; finding a game is easy. If their interests aren't really fantasy or medieval, they at least will have a working knowledge of how games work and what they are.

I'd recommend something realy ruleslight. D&D can get complicated very fast and then it is a question of gamestyle.

For oldschool I'd recommend Dungeonslayers.
For storytelling I'd recommend Fate Accelerated. That might be better suited for children, too. Thw math is reduced to some counting and the aspects/approaches give a very talking description of the character. You can even make character generation into an adventure, so you only come up with one sentence describing your character to start off.
Also interesting might be DungeonWorld or Numenara/The Strange.

I'd give them one of my copies of Fate Accelerated. Heck, I already did that a few weeks ago! It's cheap ($5) and short (48 pages digest size) and Fate is actually easier for new players to grok then "established" gamers.

I think Fate Accelerated is a great choice, for the stated reasons above.

But I think Feng Shui 2 can also be a great introduction to roleplaying. The only thing I shared with my players was the first chapter or two, including archetypes, and explained the rest during play. Players completely without experience picked up the game and had fun in that first session, and even came back for a follow up. I think the over the top nature on Feng Shui 2 can appeal to most anyone.

I second Feng Shui or Feng Shui 2. The appeal of an RPG can be to play someone awesome, rather than dredge around for a few levels as a wizard in D&D, with a real risk of death from lazy housecats and other fel beasts. In Feng Shui, you start out as awesome, as a world class spy, or martial artist, or commando, etc. Also, the mechanics in FS are super simple and only involve D6s which are readily familiar to people of the living kind.

It might seem like a cop-out, but any game they are interested in. My son's introduction to roleplaying games was Werewolf the Apocalypse 20th Anniversary. Some of the rules were over his head, but he was really excited about the game and just kept working at it until he got the rules. It was important to him. With rule heavy games, you've got to start at the rules-baseline and work your way up to the more complicated stuff. Just like anyone learning a new system.

I would run some sort of short campaign in a d10 game with Mortals from oWoD games. Nothing too supernatural, just to get them used to roleplaying a character and rolling dice. I like that many of the WoD games have a heavier focus on story and player interaction sometimes than your typical dungeon delve type game.

These sound like great suggestions. I'm not familiar with FATE, but it seems to be a setting-generic system. This is important because once someone learns a system, the setting can be changed if desired. What about starting someone out with the D&D 5e starter set? Let them use pre-gens to learn the system, then learn character creation.

That's a good point... pregens or go through chargen? Or some systems, chargen is a great way to learn about the system, but in something like D&D or d20 Cthulhu, it can be pretty intimidating. Specially for a quick game, I think I'd lean to pregen.

I'm curious to see what the Cypher System core rules are going to look like. Setting generic and the system is super easy to play.

For their first game, I'd go with a pregen. Even if they tell you what they want and you make it for them.

Let them experience the game, the rules, first. Then for session 3 or 4 do chargen with them. Walk 'em through it.

BTW, unique_exemplar, it's Fate, not FATE. And the entire SRD is free to read. Fate Accelerated is a quick read, so I'd start there.

Maybe it depends on the friend?

We've all got our own faves - I reached for FATE first, myself - but I have to wonder if that's the best approach. If my friend were a detail-driven, number-crunchy kind of person, they might like one of the myriad versions of DnD, or the equivalents for other genres.

Sorry, I haven't introduced myself yet. Saw this thread on Twitter post and jumped before I thought. Please forgive. :)

No problem! Thanks for joining us! You can hop over to the Introductions forum and introduce yourself whenever you want!

D&D 5e Lost Mines of Phandelver premade adventure. Comes prepacked with pregens, so you can skip character generation and run the first chapter of the adventure. After that, give the new player the option to carry on with the pregen or make their own. Char creation in 5e is relatively simple as well (and you can help with some of the crunch by, for example, assigning ability scores for them so they don't make a silly mistake like have a high Charisma fighter).

I can't say enough good things about the accessibility of 5e or the quality of Lost Mines as an intro adventure.