How to free yourself from the mind prison of 5th Edition Dungeons & Dragons (and engage in the rest of the hobby that has been there all along.)

-Decide you would like to try something new, because new things are fun and this is a big hobby, full of wonderful things.

-Start a new campaign using a free game that you find on itch.io or a cheap used game that you find at a crusty bookstore with a roleplaying game section. Print the rules out on your printer or at a library if the game you found only has digital copies. No recommendations for games will be provided in this post because finding the game you want to play is a game unto itself and any help would be a spoiler, learn to spend long hours steeped in the hobby of looking for games as a source of nourishment.

-Run your game once a week, regardless of who shows up. Do this online or in real life. Have a large pool of players, and never play with anyone you wouldn’t want to take a 3 hour car trip with. Never play for more than 2 hours over discord or more than three hours sitting around a real table in the real world. Try to keep people off their phones and keep track of things on large quantities of scrap paper that you are constantly losing track of. Understand that conflict may arise between the people at your table and try to treat those situations as if it were a dinner party and don’t expect a games rulebook to help with these conflicts.

-Talk to your group of gaming friends about the kind of game they want to play. LISTEN TO THEM. What parts of RPGs do they like, and which ones do they not care about? Do they like to be partially in control of story beats, or do they like the thrill of exploring an established world? Find out the things that you all find fun, and build your homebrew rules around those things as you go, cutting away the parts you collectively don’t need. 

-Be a hype machine for free game stuff. There are a million and a half things that folks have made to make your life as a Game Enjoyer easier, use as much of them as you need, and leave nice reviews of things in your wake.

-Ignore the majority of the rules of that game you printed out, it's only really there as a mascot for the activity and something for people to thumb through while they talk about a different game that they have been meaning to play. Consult it around once per session to see how much a bottle of holy water costs.

-Only play with people you trust to not lie about their dice rolls, and if they do lie about their dice rolls, understand that maybe they really need this, and just let it slide. 

-Start a blog to keep track of everything going on in your campaign in between sessions and for players to submit reports of their adventures from their characters perspectives.

-Be excellent to each other. This is a hobby, not life or death.