I have never played Dungeons and Dragons in my life, I never even learned any of the rules or steps. But I want to play eventually so now is the time to start right?

What's the best way to get your foot in the door with this game and begin learning how to play/actually begin playing?

You could try familiarizing yourself with the way the world works by playing a video game based on it. Particularly Baldur's Gate, people love that one.

Otherwise, I recommend spending some time at a board game store with tables, usually people are playing something there. If you get a nice group to nestle into, it'd get you closer.

First we sell your soul... oh, no, that's the Dark Dungeons version. I'll just burn this.

First you decide what your standard for actually playing is. Forum games are all over the place and make for very low speed play so you can try to work out what you're up to, even if that involves long conferences with other players. If you need it to be real time but online is fine your best bet is probably somewhere like roll20 and ask if anyone's starting a campaign. If it absolutely must be around a physical table then you're going to need to ask google for gaming/hobby stories near you.

Once you've settled on where you're playing that will likely have decided what edition you're playing, too. If there are multiple game types running then my personal preference would be 3.5, then Pathfinder, 5th edition, AD&D. If they want to play 4th then flee while you can.

Baldur's Gate, for reference's sake, is AD&D. You'll be introduced to concepts like THAC0 (To Hit Armor Class 0), which was the original system and encouraged you to get the lowest possible AC; if they have a THAC0 of 14 and you have 10 AC then you're basically throwing yourself at their weapon and they only need to roll a 4 to hit. If you have -10 then they may as well throw their hands up and surrender, because that die they're throwing only goes up to 20. After A&D you ne'er see that little thing again and everyone hopes to roll higher than your AC. These kinds of details can really screw a new player up.

Watching a group that may potentially invite you later is a very good way to learn the game and the eccentricities of the group... say, if this middle-aged man likes to play a magic girl or possibly far worse a low-charisma wizard who wants to constantly shriek to the room how he's looking for women to seduce. (No, that is sadly not a deranged hypothetical)

If you want to just get to know the system while you look for places that would play, https://www.d20pfsrd.com/ is for all non-proprietary stuff in Pathfinder. I or probably a good dozen to score of people here can talk you through anything you don't understand.

Noyb42 : You can play on forums? Is it harder or more time consuming than a physicial game?

It's more time consuming, certainly. Mainly in the time you wait for responses... I've seen ones where people are playing by forum specifically because they can't do more than post once a week. This is particularly irritating when in combat; if the guy running things (DM for Dungeon Master is the usual term, sometimes GM for Game Master) is the particularly slow one it means any questions or quibbles over what is where and how one could move will take ages.

This makes combat less frequent in forum games, since they have to go at the pace of the slowest poster while noncombat situations may simply proceed on assumption the slow guy had nothing important to say right now.

On the other hand, I've never seen a forum game with a long, drawn-out argument about how it's against the local social/ethical climate to accept a given job or an obnoxious player threatening to stonewall progress until the DM makes up the ditty that got an NPC jailed for conduct seriously unbecoming. Those were both courtesy of the crowd at my local gaming shop who love being face to face so they can see who's best at undermining and derailing each other's games.

Pathfinder is also quite good and with the new path finder 2nd edition, they've simplified a lot of things. A good way to find places to play would be on places like the war horn site and theres like events where you can get boons (bonuses) for your character when you go to them, the exp for your character is based on the amount of sessions you go to, since 2nd edition is still pretty new most people are around level 1 or 2. It's a good way of getting to know new people and unlike campaigns which can potentially take years to complete depending on how often you meet up to play and how much you get done in the session, the sessions when you go out to play are much shorter so that the whole adventure can be completed in a matter of hours. If you use a preset character you can transfer the exp over to a character of your own creation. You can also unlock new races to start out as for any new characters. Then theres also star finder which is basically much more sci fi based, you get to ride around in space ships and travel to new planets etc.

LuckyCharms : Is it usually expensive.

Not really although it might vary slightly for places near you.

I don't know about War Horn but what Lucky's describing sounds a lot like the RPGA. That's an organization of Wizards of the Coast, designed to let people slap down character sheets on tables surrounded by people they have never played with before and know that it's still... roughly... equal. It doesn't cost anything and is highly prized by its advocates because it's so much easier than finding someone running their own campaign, not to mention that someone running their campaign is rarely looking for new players.

The problem? It's run exclusively on modules. I have not had good history with modules, which seem designed to impede the roleplaying that is the primary point to roleplaying games. Some of them are nothing more than going from point A to B to C and surviving the fights along the way. Others think they are providing logical puzzles but you'd need to have read the module yourself first if you wanted to understand the logic involved. None of them encourage you to make your character's race or class a factor in your decisions and things like personal philosophy are right out. It can really give a very bad impression of how the game should go.

We do a home session once every week and then we go out to another session for every 2nd week, the campaign we we're doing currently has been ongoing for 2 years I think? XD I've kinda lost track we're 5/6 books in I believe. We're level 14 and the only time we lost a character is when we got a team player kill last session although turns out our newer characters are more busted than the old ones so it feels more like an upgrade to me XD. Heal and harm are really busted.

Noyb42 :
LuckyCharms :

Thanks for the help. I'm going to see what I can do. I found a couple books at Barnes and Noble too so I'm going to check those out as well and hopefully I can play soon.

zanderlex : On this, the one year anniversary since you said you'd hopefully be able to play soon... how's that been going? I know with covid it's been very much a matter of online or bust, but there were a lot of free or nearly-free tabletop RPG systems around last March as people tried to put together packages to help us through what everyone assumed would be maybe four months of shelter in place.

Noyb42 : Still have yet to play my first game. But I did buy this weird book/collectors thing that had to do with Stranger Things because it was only like $15 and it looks cool.

There are a lot of those, so I couldn't guess which you mean. If you're looking for something lighter while we're all still mainly staying home (estimated to be through August in my area... okay, that's when we're supposed to stop quarantining, most already have) then you can hit Google up for micro RPGs like Lasers & Feelings.

I could even try to set up Blades in the Dark as a Vizzed forum campaign. It'd be slow, but the system insists that its simplicity is one of its core strengths so there isn't much for people without the player's guide to have to remember. 12 different skills, an ally (or enemy) or two, whether or not you're injured, what vice you indulge for stress relief (this can involve anything hedonistic or be about your faith or devotion to family or a cause instead)... mainly it's up to the GM to listen to what you're doing and try to make that work, with things like maps heavily discouraged as impediments to freeform thought.

Noyb42 : How long do campaigns like that usually last? Something like that might sound fun to do here if there's some more people involved. Maybe even a prize.

The campaigns go 'as long as people want' and the people who developed it encourage players to continue even after their character is dead or retired. That's a tad more ambitious than I want to try to be about this.

If we can get a group of three or four players (I don't count, I'll be busying GMing) to go for a single heist then we can see how it goes from there. Since it's all cooperative I'm not sure how you'd award a prize.