I'm always surprised how quickly new players pick up D&D. Well designed starting scenarios and pre-generated characters can get new players up and playing (a shout out here to the first 5E Starter Set, The Lost Mine of Phandelver. Not perfect, but very good, and far better that the two sets that followed it).
This is an argument against the increasing multitude of options, especially for new players. The players' choices should always matter, but to begin with it helps if these choices are 'what to do?', rather than 'which of the hundreds of options I have do I use now?'.
But there are other games that are as easy or easier to learn.
RPGs that provide Quickstart rules are great. You might not learn all the rules, but certainly enough to play, and, importantly, enough to decide if it's for you.
Savage Worlds do some great Quickstarts, often promoting their published settings.
HeroKids is another, and is a great way to introduce younger people to RPGs
I will note, however, a trend for Quick to mean 'only a little bit faster than normal'. I got a free Quickstart recently for an OSR* that topped out just short of 100 pages. This included pre-generated characters and a short adventure, but still.
If you carefully poke around on the internet you'll find even shorter RPGs. I have one called Microlite d20, which is very much an OSR game, but because there's so little to it, its fast to get running, and it's adaptable to different genres.
But I'm supposed to make a decision here, and I'm once again nominating Rivers of London. The ENNIE award winning scenario The Domestic is a great way to learn both how to create a character and how the basics of the game work. It's available to download free from Chaosium's website.
If you want something a little darker, Alone Against the Flames does a similar thing for Call of Cthulhu, though you'll also need the free quickstart rules, also available on their website.
And because I just can't stop typing sometimes, I'll mention the D&D 4E Red Box. This included a choose your path adventure which worked in a very similar manner. The Red Box was a starter set, and featured a Red Dragon very familiar to those of us who remembered the old Basic D&D boxed set.
The mini adventure featured one character who was accompanying a dwarven merchant. When goblins attacked, choices such as 'do you solve problems by fighting or magic?' helped guide the player to create their first character.
There are a couple of strikes against it though; the starter set came out long after the game was first published, and, well, it's 4E.
*Old School Renaissance, basically any game that aims to recreate the feel of the original dungeon crawling games.
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