[Murrkon5]

I once tried to convince a gaggle of good friends to try TFT. They wanted no part of it. All they knew about RPGs came from second-hand stories about D&D. Rigid character classes and alignments interested them not even a little bit. I managed to wear them down, saying they were not obligated to play a hobbit or dwarf or whatever. They came back with outlandish character concepts, expecting me to wilt. I did not. We designed those whackadoodle characters and had a game. Those first characters didn't survive long, but the guys were hooked. Subsequent characters were still pretty off-the-wall, but functional.

Second moment came years later and I was going to run a supers campaign. One lady wanted to join in desperately, but her parents had forbade those mind-rotting things in the house. She therefore felt she had no knowledge of the supers genre and probably would have to miss out. She was a great SF fan. I explained that many superheroes were, in fact, aliens from another planet. Don't think "superhero" so much as visualizing Mr. Spock or a Kzinti or someone stranded on Earth. And make that alien generally a nice guy. I've never seen the proverbial "light bulb" go off in someone's eyes so distinctly.

Similar to that woman, and in a few other instances, I've had people who shy away because they've never read or seen "LotR". My gateway for them is "The Wizard of Oz". Everyone has watched the quest of the fellowship of the yellow brick road. It's perhaps the best general example of a group of PCs with a goal, facing challenges physical and magical. Though I have yet to run a game with that much choreography and singing.