One of the biggest trends over the last several years of RPG development is the rise of "rules lite" games, where games have less crunch overall: fewer situations where the ruleset handles specific situations, less control over what happens in a given situation, and less formality in creating encounters, creatures, events, and especially the characters who play in the stories.
This can actually be a challenge to people who are used to the more structured rulesets of D&D where for example you have separate rules for "good at a weapon", "can use a weapon", "improvised attack, but are good at it" and "improvised attack with whatever is lying around" (not to mention unarmed attacks by monks, unarmed-trained characters and people who do d2+strength with their fists) all of which have either lethal or non-lethal damage types.
But in general, there is a degree of cinematic elegance to "tell me what you're going to do, and we'll figure out how to determine success" in a game system where the rules define the scope of what's possible in one action. This elegance, once people "get" the dynamic, makes games both approachable and easy to learn and play.
Today, I'm going to talk about a few different things: Games that are easy to learn by players, and games that are easy to learn by GMs, which is a different situation.
Easy to Learn as a Player
A game that's easy for a player needs to have a simple character sheet and easy event-resolution mechanics. There are a lot of games that become easy quickly, such as Monster of the Week or Cypher System: they have a bit of a learning curve, including some oddities in rules or vocabulary, but once you "get them" they are straightforward.
My gut answer is an older game, called QAGS, which is available for "free / pay what you want / please donate the cost of the PDF to a food shelter". It was one of the first rules-lite systems, and is also generic. I've played super hero, "Jonny Quest", Hobomancy, Laser Ponies and 3 Musketeers. It's a game system that encourages creativity and often silliness, but especially the 3 Musketeers game was fun but quite serious.
The base character has five scored items: 3 stats, a job and a gimmick. You roll dice to generate five numbers, and and assign those 5 numbers to each of the five items--no distinction between stats and job/gimmick. You then add three skills, which are rated "+3, +2, +1" respectively, add a few descriptors, and you're done.
As you play, you describe what you want to do, choose which skills or abilities you want to come into play and roll to see what happens.
The elegance of QAGS is that because you are choosing your skills, job and gimmick for the game you are going to play, you can easily tune your character to any scenario. Superheroes might have a "teleport" gimmick, and skills in "super-punch" and "save-the-citizen". A musketeer might have a gimmick of "right place, right time", and skills of "stealth" and "swordplay". I made those gimmicks up in writing this, because they aren't defined by the game--the whole point is to create what you want. (Though some of their theme add-ons, such as Hobomancy, offer examples types of skills and gimmicks one might find in that environment, to get them up to speed faster.)
Easy to Learn as a GM
QAGS also isn't hard to run as a GM, but it's not my pick, because the 70 page ruleset talks about how to run the game over time, and some of the "con" rules get more complicated when you're going to keep a game going over time: For example, con games never worry about injury besides dealing with it in the session, you have more complicated recovery mechanics to consider in the real game.
I think that my pick for "Easiest to Run" is Matrix Games, another older system. The GM in this case runs the group through pre-defined scenarios, and their only job is to execute the next "phase" of the story, and to adjudicate the scenes as they occur.
From a story perspective, they describe what's going on, and let the players decide what to do. As the game progresses, they bring out new scenes, situations and so on. (So for example, in a college campus zombie outbreak, it begins with strange rumors of aggressive students. Phase II is when the first zombies show up, who might very well bite and turn the characters. Phase III might be the introduction of an uber-zombie who is controlling the outbreak--or whatever, and you end up with a resolution at the end, which could be total-success, or "and then the world gets wiped out." From a GM perspective, I have admired that people running the games were sometimes just people who walked into the booth at GenCon and were asked to run it. One of my friends who staunchly refused to GM anything, picked this game up and did a fantastic job with it.
From an adjudication perespective, the rules are very simple. If you describe the outcome of an action, and nobody disagrees, then it works. If a character describes "I jump off the very tall building, grab the flagpole and leap to safety" and nobody challenges it, then that is exactly what happens. If it's challenged, there's some discussion of why it would or wouldn't work, and the GM assigns dice targets for the actor and challenger based on their view of feasibility of each. They roll off and the canon narrative is whoever wins the roll.
Between these two roles, both of which are very easy, a unique, interesting and fun story emerges, and the GM doesn't have to know any rules or spend any real time learning things to make it happen, beyond reading the module to get a "feel" for the story.
GMless Games
There is a whole new genre of games which are GMless, which means the players just play out stories, and no one person has to be "in charge" of the game. These are almost always very easy to play, and done well can be incredibly fun.
My first experience with this is a game called
Die Laughing, by NerdBurger Games. This game has a rotating player who helps drive the narrative each round; they make some decisions based on their own choices and some decisions based on table lookups, but are still full participants in the game.
I am listing this for my choice for this section, as well as making it the header art, because I didn't sense any confusion at the table after the brief overview. It was easy to play, and easy run--and the game was a lot of fun without being the barely-controlled chaos that a lot of free-form games can end up being. Things got silly, but not off the charts so--the rules lite format managed to contain the action without putting explicit and or situationally complex rules in to do so.
In short, this is a game that I wouldn't hesitate to bring out as a party game for RPG-minded friends, even if those friends weren't really RPG players or GMs.
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