Quick, while everyone is focused on the 5.24 PHB...

[Ruin Explorer]

Ooooh, this is a difficult one to answer accurately, because whilst D&D was my first real RPG, once we'd played it, my brother and I picked up several other RPGs pretty quickly, and kept buying them rapidly for years.

I think there are two "most likely" candidates though, interestingly both comic-book-based, though I wasn't a big comics guy at the time:

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles & Other Strangeness

or

Marvel FASERIP

The other way to look at it would be if you count The Riddling Reaver as a RPG - I think it's on the borderline, because it was a multiplayer choose-your-own-adventure book. If so I actually played it briefly beofre D&D, but then my mum confiscated it, solely on the grounds that it appeared to be too gory and violent for an eight-year-old.

 

[Velderan]

Ooooh, this is a difficult one to answer accurately, because whilst D&D was my first real RPG, once we'd played it, my brother and I picked up several other RPGs pretty quickly, and kept buying them rapidly for years.

I think there are two "most likely" candidates though, interestingly both comic-book-based, though I wasn't a big comics guy at the time:

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles & Other Strangeness

or

Marvel FASERIP

The other way to look at it would be if you count The Riddling Reaver as a RPG - I think it's on the borderline, because it was a multiplayer choose-your-own-adventure book. If so I actually played it briefly beofre D&D, but then my mum confiscated it, solely on the grounds that it appeared to be too gory and violent for an eight-year-old.

I still have my old Marvel FASERIP books and aside from some glaring balance issues, the system seems like it would actually still be quite a bit of fun to play and I would like to try running it sommetime with my regular group.

Meanwhile I found someone's TMNT collection at a used bookstore around the time the Kickstarter launched to reprint the books, so I bought them and after skimming through the rules, I decided I was just really into TMNT when I played it the first time around because it doesn't look like something I'd want to play in 2024.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I still have my old Marvel FASERIP books and aside from some glaring balance issues, the system seems like it would actually still be quite a bit of fun to play and I would like to try running it sommetime with my regular group.

Meanwhile I found someone's TMNT collection at a used bookstore around the time the Kickstarter launched to reprint the books, so I bought them and after skimming through the rules, I decided I was just really into TMNT when I played it the first time around because it doesn't look like something I'd want to play in 2024.

Yeah I would concur. FASERIP basically holds up as a system today - you could definitely add mechanisms to make it more balanced, but it fundamentally works pretty well even without that and indeed isn't a million miles from modern systems. Certainly far better and ironically far more modern than the recent Marvel Multiverse RPG!

Whereas TMNT is Palladium and Palladium was so dubious as a system were were mocking its design aged 14 and 15, and by our later teens just didn't want to play any games that used it, no matter how cute the concepts (and Palladium games did have some cool concepts - Palladium Fantasy, TMNT/ATB, Rifts, Nightbane/Nightspawn, and so on). Admittedly TMNT was one of the least-bad implementations of it, but it was still pretty bad. The modern successor game is Mutants in the Now, which has it's own system, and is apparently pretty good (I haven't played it myself).

 

[Velderan]

Yeah I would concur. FASERIP basically holds up as a system today - you could definitely add mechanisms to make it more balanced, but it fundamentally works pretty well even without that and indeed isn't a million miles from modern systems. Certainly far better and ironically far more modern than the recent Marvel Multiverse RPG!

Whereas TMNT is Palladium and Palladium was so dubious as a system were were mocking its design aged 14 and 15, and by our later teens just didn't want to play any games that used it, no matter how cute the concepts (and Palladium games did have some cool concepts - Palladium Fantasy, TMNT/ATB, Rifts, Nightbane/Nightspawn, and so on). Admittedly TMNT was one of the least-bad implementations of it, but it was still pretty bad. The modern successor game is Mutants in the Now, which has it's own system, and is apparently pretty good (I haven't played it myself).

The retroclone FASERIP has a simple mechanic to fix the balance issue. It's basically the GM sets a power level for the campaign (so Excellent in TSR Marvel rules) and everything is built off of that rating for the campaign with a potential shift of (I think..) 2 ranks up or down. It fixes a lot of the issues TSR Marvel had with having someone like Hulk in a campaign with Punisher, though I haven't played it yet to see how far it goes to address those issues.

 

[Gradine]

I didn't know it at the time, but I did once end up in a pair of online games, one of which was definitely an older version of BESM and the other I would learn was a slight tweak on GURPS. If video games count, then there's always the SNES version of Shadowrun, which I thought was pretty cool at the time.

First experience in-person with the actual books was when my friend talked us into running a game as an X-Men team using... the DC Roleplaying Game. My mutant had a bunch of shield powers and was codenamed Aegis. Very fun game, for as little as we played it.

Prior to that there were a few Hackmaster and Star Wars D20 games, but those aren't appreciably different from D&D.

Oh and I spent a bunch of time reading my brother's WEG Star Wars books and making dozens of characters but I never actually got to play it.

 

[not-so-newguy]

Star Frontiers.
Casting off the shackles of Alignment, we immediately turned into amoral sociopaths. We made quite a few Credits by selling body parts to be used for cyborgs on the black market. Plus, we got kewl space goggles.

 

[Wolfpack48]

It’s a tricky one. I played a one shot Traveller session I really liked, MERP was in there and Rolemaster not long after. Started with blue box D&D but switched to AD&D pretty early. I do think the Traveller session was first as we were also playing GEV/Ogre and Star Fleet Battles around this time. Call of Cthulhu wasn’t long after and we really started exploring non-D&D games at that point.

 

[cbwjm]

My first RPG that I can clearly remember playing was Advanced Fighting Fantasy, it was a natural move from the pick a path books that they'd released. I used to play it at high school back when I was 13 or 14. I can't really remember the games or even what I played (probably an elf) but I remember having fun playing it during lunch breaks.

 

[Iosue]

Technically, my first non-D&D RPG was the Marvel Super-Heroes RPG Advanced Box Set. But this was limited to a one-shot I ran for my brother. Then I got my first job and started spending my disposable income on game systems that I would read and make characters for, but never get to actually play: TMNT and Other Strangeness, Ninjas & Superspies, GURPS 3rd Edition (sourcebooks: China, Martial Arts, Illuminati University, Compendium I and II, and Vampire: the Masquerade), the last of which led to getting 2nd Edition V:TM, W:TA and M:TA, and then WEG Star Wars 1st and 2nd Editions.

The first non-D&D RPG that I actually played, as in made a character and played for multiple sessions, was WEG Star Wars 2nd Edition.