I ran a hands-on introduction to tabletop role playing games at SouthEast LinuxFest for a room full of Linux nerds, most of whom had never rolled a die in their life outside of a D20 keychain.
The talk covered the landscape first. D&D as the genre’s default reference point, Savage Worlds as my personal favorite for its exploding dice and genre-agnostic core rules, and Dungeon World as the system built for exactly the kind of chaotic, large-group, low-prep session I needed for a room that could have had anywhere from 10 to 100 people. Dungeon World was the right call specifically because the GM never rolls dice and there is no initiative tracking, which meant we could move fast without getting bogged down in mechanics nobody in the room knew yet.
Then we built a one-shot live, entirely from audience suggestions. We ended up with Ethan, a 97-year-old elf wizard going through what was politely described as a midlife crisis, hanging out at the Fiddlesticks Tiki Bar in a town that briefly did not have a name and now does. A villain named Bob had stolen the turtles that were the secret ingredient in the bar’s signature tacos. What followed was a fire, a cooling spell improvised through prestidigitation, a discern realities roll that turned up a suspiciously cardboard turtle, and a town leader with a Southern accent revealing that Bob had swapped out the real ingredients for props. None of it was planned. All of it worked, because that is the entire point of running the game this way.
If you have ever been curious about TTRPGs but did not know where to start, this is about as close as you can get to watching one happen in real time, mistakes, tangents, and all.