Games

If you want a dnd like experience Pathfinder is your bet, it's got a lot more rules to it but if you read them you'll understand why. You can read them for free on aonprd.com by the way. Pathfinder gives you far more creative freedom than 5e while still being relatively tight.

My person recommendation for newbies to the hobby is Chronicles of Darkness. It's way cheaper than 5e too, if you stick to a single splat, think something like a race expanded out into a full game; vampires, werewolves, mages, changelings, humans who hunt monsters, mutants, things like that. The games are narrative focused but don't neglect combat (like 5e neglects narrative).

• it's got a more free form point buy system, instead of leveling up and all your dice rolls just get better you get to put experience into whatever skill/ability you want to be better at or perk you want to have.

• it's mechanics are genuinely simple, almost everything in the game is handled with the same kind of roll; you and your dm picks a skill (let's say crafting) and an ability (like 5e's ability scores, let's say intelligence) for whatever you want to do then you roll however many d10s as points you have in those scores.

• it's setting is easier to understand, it's just modern day earth with a magical underground, that makes it way easier to know how much any given thing would cost or where you gotta go to do something. There are lots of weird things going on, but a new player doesn't need all of those and has plenty of information to be grounded otherwise.

• it gives you lots of things to work with (like bloodlines for vampires or groups to join as anything else) but also explicitly encourages you and your dm to create new things with the base stuff as guidelines.

A few other recommendations; world of darkness is my preferred game, so i gotta mention it. Gurps is the most open game I've ever played, you can do literally anything.